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Movie:		2.0
Picture:		7.0
Sound:		7.0
Extras:		5.0
Score:		3.0

Director(s):	Hoyt Yeatman
Writer(s):	Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley
Starring:	Bill Nighy • Jon Favreau • Nicolas Cage • Sam Rockwell • Steve Buscemi • Tracy Morgan • Will Arnett • Zack Galifianakis • Penelope Cruz
Genre:	Action • Children & Family • Comedy
Website:	http://disneydvd.disney.go.com/g-force.html
Release Date:	December 15, 2009
Rated:

List Price:	Blu-ray - $19.99
Amazon:

Watching G-Force all the way through might just be the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life. Hollywood pumps out lots of waste through the bilge pump it calls cinemas, but sometimes something gets stuck in the pipes. It lingers and festers into something more rank and disgusting than anything you could have imagined. If I had to guess, G-Force is the unholy sewage alliance of some Stuart Little spin-off and the nth Baby Geniuses sequel that got torpedoed straight to DVD. Both of them got lodged in septic system and over time molded together into this: talking guinea pigs acting as spies with dim-witted handlers. You put up with a lot of dreck for your kids, but G-Force lacks any entertainment value for adults whatsoever. There are lots of ways to entertain the children, don’t let this be one of them.

Let’s take a look at the thought process that went into this:

Executive 1: We need a movie.

Executive 2: What did you have in mind?

Executive 3: How about the ABC program? Animals, Bruckheimer, CGI?

Executive 2: The holy trinity?

Executive 3: Damn straight. Now what kind of animals haven’t been used?

Executive1: Dolphins?

Executive 2: Everyone uses dolphins. Let’s go with something small.

Executive 1: Mice?

Executive 3: We already have one for our mascot, think outside the box.

Executive 1: Rats?

Executive 2: We just did Ratatouille – outside the box?

Executive 1: Gerbils? Weasels? Guinea Pigs? Flying Squirrels?

Executive 2: Go back one. Guinea pigs. Why hasn’t that been done?

Executive 3: Because they aren’t very exciting. But they could be!

Executive 2 & 3: Bruckheimer!

Executive 1: What’s it about?

Executive 3: Who the hell cares? Steal a plot from a few other movies, make some CGI guinea pigs, and then call in favors from celebrities who have kids now and want their offspring to be able to see something they’re in.

Executive 2: Huzzah!

Executive 1: We got our jobs through nepotism!

That’s being generous of course. Roping in Nicolas Cage, Sam Rockwell, Jon Favreau, Penelope Cruz, Tracy Morgan and Steve Buscemi to play a mole, four guinea pigs and a mouse, respectively, might make this one of the best cast disasters of the year. To top it off, G-Force is another poor film choice by Will Arnett (he has a horrible film average at this point) and one of the break-out roles of Zach Galifianakis for the year (the other being The Hangover). Then, as if all those names weren’t enough to draw in the cautious parent, you have Bill Nighy speaking through his teeth (as always) to play a smarmy British business dynamo who ends up as one of the most ridiculously awful villains I’ve ever seen in a children’s film.

Darwin (Rockwell), Blaster (Morgan), Juarez (Cruz) and Speckles (Cage) comprise an elite squad of rodent spies who mount a final mission to prove their worth to the government. Their efforts are sabotaged, however, and the data they gather goes missing. Expelled from the force, the squad become denizens of a run of the mill pet store where they meet Hurley (Favreau), a spunky good-for-nothing guinea pig with no real life goals or ambitions, the kind of guinea pig every father wants their daughter to…that joke ends there. Hurley becomes a de facto part of their team and set out to clear their name and get to the dastardly plan behind Leonard Saber (Nighy) and his plan for globally linked electronics.

There’s something to be said for the decently animated guinea pigs, but beyond that there’s no excusing this conglomerate of horrible performances and fart jokes substituted for any real storytelling or filmmaking effort. Disney doesn’t usually swing and miss this badly, typically there’s at least something for the parents to enjoy, but not this time.

Blu-ray Bonus Features

There are a few standard featurettes like bloopers (actors flubbing their lines and the CGI guinea pigs animated accordingly), deleted scenes and behind the scenes pieces about the CG used in the film and all the work that went into animating the main characters. The featurettes are entertaining until the guinea pigs show up and ruin everything – which happens right away. Disney included a few music videos for some of the songs used in the movie. If you ever thought you’d be encouraging your children to watch a music video by Flo Rida this is the one and only time, as it now features clips from the movie. Two final pieces, one about the “training” the “guinea pigs” went through and another about telling us the inspiration for the film (see dialogue above) complete the Blu-ray disc’s extras. Additionally, this set features a DVD and digital copy of the film.