FIERCE CREATURES (23)

Directed by: Robert M. Young and Fred Schepisi

Starring: John Cleese, Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Palin

The Pitch: An English zoo, newly acquired by a vulgar media baron, is threatened with closure unless it can somehow turn a profit.

Theo Sez: Hard to say why this should be so tired and prosaic - after all, A FISH CALLED WANDA, with the same cast, is equally patchy and visually indifferent without such dispiriting results (quite the opposite, in fact). Part of it must be due to its being significantly softer than WANDA: it buys wholesale into the English worship of animals (which the earlier film satirised), with plenty of cute-beastie shots and frequent dead scenes involving the over-virtuous zoo keepers (all dressed in ridiculous matching jumpsuits, like a Club Med hiking holiday), and even softens Cleese from his Basil Fawltyish buffoonish autocrat into a gooey glob of sensitivity. Worst of all, it has no internal logic (a prerequisite for this kind of farce), the characters' behaviour often implausible - is it really necessary to strip naked because there's a spider in the room? - and wildly inconsistent: Curtis is supposed to be a hotshot trouble-shooter and "natural born corporate killer" but lets Kline take all the initiative; Palin, in a grossly misconceived role, veers from eccentric genius to bloody nuisance; etc. etc. It's not totally without laughs, but it's the kind of film that thinks it's making a clever and subversive joke by filling a scene with product-placements so as to mock the notion of corporate sponsorship.