Film

Initiatives to preserve wilderness areas from human encroachment would be much harder to defend politically if it were revealed that the wildlife they sustain consists of smaller, furrier versions of that crotch-wounding, fist-pumping little bastard Macaulay Culkin. At the same time, few crotches in this great land of ours are as due for sustained pummeling as that of Brendan Fraser, whose serial crimes against family entertainment can no longer be ignored or countenanced. But there’s still no reason such punishment should be meted out before the public, much less in the view of our most precious resource of all, America’s children.

Whatever. Fraser is a real-estate developer tasked by his evil Asian boss (Jeong) with cutting down an Oregonian forest to build a McMansion community; Shields is his exasperated wife, whose back is invariably turned whenever a CGI-tweaked raccoon or wombat inflicts retaliatory crotch-damage on her husband. Most of this is exactly as dispirited and perfunctory as you’d expect from the billboards. Once or twice the misery is punctuated by actual humor (e.g. Huss’s Dadaist turn as a demented security chief), but these unexpected nuggets only serve to highlight the lazy, cynical indifference that saturates every other aspect of this grueling turkey—the script, the score, the editing, the lighting and the font used in the final credits.