WATCH NOW
Dug is the title character in “Early Man”, a caveman. If that made you chuckle, this is… There’s really no other way to to put it, your type of movie. This is the type of movie which makes you ponder, “They wouldn’t make a joke that basic”, only for the movie to justify the thoughts you were having. Following this, the movie then goes forward to perform what can be best described as a soft-shoe routine, with out stretched hands, and a shout of “ta-dah.”
In Park’s mind, stop animated films about stone age people fighting bronze age people is just an excuse for 90 minutes of shameless acting. The creator of Wallace and Gromit seems to have had the whole movie planned out in mind. These routines are punctuated by dialogues between a non smart character and a character labeled “the smart one” exclusively because he is not as dumb as the character he speaks to. In this movie, “Early Man”, there really is only one classification of characters, naive and innocent fools, or over confident twits whose fallacies will come crashing down on them. The story is merely an excuse for Park to show off his slick comedy while single handedly directing a feature for the first time in his career.
Park along with his screenwriters, Merling Crossingham and Will Becker, appear to be drawing from The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, as well as Mel Brooks: masters of comedy so ancient that they deserve official portraits that are cave carvings.
The movie fails to meet the expectations set by its magnficiently silly opening sequence which depicts how dinosaurs went extinct. Park’s camera slowly zooms out from the erupting volcano to reveal an entire tableau of a triceratops fighting a tyrannosaurus rex as well as humans battling each other (one man attempts to chew another’s foot as if it were a meatball hero). The next uncovering of the meteorite’s fragments in a crater leads, with no option left, to the creation of soccer, or as we call it in America, soccer: a caveman attempts to grab the burning piece of rock shaped like a ball with a pattern of hexagons and was the size of a real soccer ball. However, the ball was red hot so he dropped it. Another caveman picks it up, then drops it, allowing it to roll to a third caveman’s feet. The screamer, who now had his feet burned, kicked the ball to try and escape.
And that is how “Early Man” gets transformed into a sports film. The chronicle, um, begins a bit further along the timeline of evolution. The reasonable yet incredibly stupid Dug (Eddie Redmayne) and the even more foolish tribal chief Bobnar (Timothy Spall) are threatened by the army of a nearby bronze age society which attacks the tribe’s peaceful, forested valley with armed mammoths while claiming the area’s bronze deposit. Dug is taken prisoner, finds himself infatuated with a pan seller called Goona (Maisie Williams), and eventually gets transported into an arena where football is the main attraction. This is also when Dug gets the brilliant idea of challenging the local champion team Real Bronze to a match. The victor would seize control of the valley and its bronze reserves. However, the leader of the bad guys, Lord North (Tom Hiddleston), thinks this is a great idea but for a different reason. His teammates are professionals, but Dug is an amateur and a chowderhead to boot. It’s very clear that his people have no clue as to the existence of football, let alone how to play it. Without a doubt, the very first training session is a disaster.
The fellow tribesman misunderstood him when he stated that they had to vanquish the ball. He seems to perplex and annoy them when he says that football is a game played with the feet and that hands are only allowed for goalkeeping, tossing the ball back into play, and signaling definitely not for punching someone in the face and picking up the ball while they’re unconscious. It seems Goona is a remarkable footballer who was not allowed to play against men in the cage. She is likely to be eager to put her talent to work on training for Dug’s team and before too long Lord North starts to be under pressure from Queen Oofeefa, who makes no secret of the fact she expects him to win without any trouble.
There is nothing here that any person acquainted with sporran films and psuedo prehistoric escapades would find surprising.
What people seem to enjoy about ‘Early Man’ is how Park and his team of writers portray the protagonist’s oafishness and the droll villains’ snooty attitude. They paraody dreg cliches by speaking in flattering Franch Ok-santz-suh accents. This includes baby crocodiles that serve as clothespins for laundry, scarab beetles that trim beards, and message birds that parrots anything the sender says, encouraging the belief that the sender’s message is kept a secret. No reasonable joke seems too ridiculous for the Park group to not go and go all out. Encountering sliced bread for the first time in the Bronze Age, a Stone Ager shouts: “That’s the best thing since sliced bread. Well nothing…” When Lord Nooth’s infantry heads into the valley, he reflects, “Start mining ore.” An underling replies with, “Or what?”
For this film, you already know whether or not you would be willing to watch it. You have been either warned or enabled.
To watch more movies like Early Man visit 123Movies.
Also Watch for more movies like:
