Watching Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer runs akin to sticking a needle into the corner of your eye and then attaching it to a bag filled with liquefied gummy bears and Mountain Dew. If the sugar of that cocktail doesn’t give you diabetes and push you into a sugar coma, then at least you’ll find consolation in the fact that pushing that much sugar through your eyes will cause blindness and thus prevent half of the film’s assault on your senses from there on out. While it’s not hard to understand why yet another children’s novel was adapted to a film, especially in the wake the success of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid adaptations, but you have to wonder why it had to be this obnoxious and simplistic. There are those children’s films that both parents and their children can enjoy and then there are those just for the kids. This is a case of the latter, but its target age group has shrunk significantly thanks to the scripting and casting choices that have reduced it to nothing but a flurry of hyperkinetic kids on a perpetual sugar high.
Judy Moody has the plan for the best summer ever: she and her friends will fulfill a series of dares with assigned point values in a race to 100 points. That plan, however, will need some revision as her friends get pulled away to Borneo and circus camp, leaving her and her friend Frank to fend for themselves on the front of summer shenanigans. When Judy’s parents announce that they too will be leaving, to help a grandparent, it seems like the summer is sunk. Then Judy met her Aunt Opal, a free-spirited artist highly encouraging of having new experiences. Judy decides the summer might be salvageable after all and restarts the dare challenge, with her two out of town friends using other activities to replace the ones she’ll be pursuing. Unfortunately for Judy, no matter what she tries to do to win points, something goes horribly wrong, putting her in last place as the summer comes to a close. With one last chance to earn points and win the game, can Judy and her brother find Bigfoot, gain national fame, and win the point jackpot?
Ever feel like a children’s movie doesn’t have a script as much as an episode of Phineas & Ferb that it stretched out to fit a 90-minute skeleton? Look no further, because Judy Moody fits that description perfectly. This isn’t so much an original idea as it is the extended edition of almost every “Summer Vacation” episode of every cartoon you’ve ever seen. To fill out the new runtime, the story is padded with random, pointless non-adventures and a “Where’s Waldo?”-esque plotline that have all the cleverness of a whoopee cushion. Its lack of related content is so blatant, in fact, that it jumps into a random and shameless dance sequence just to kill time. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer can’t be considered a full film by any stretch of the imagination, but then it really doesn’t have an audience anyways.
What age group does a film like Judy Moody cater to? It’s silly to the point of stupid for children over the ages of six, and for anyone younger than that it’s just a flurry of color of noise. If the film was only supposed to appeal to that range, then the casting of Jordanna Beatty as the titular Judy Moody was a stroke of genius. She explodes with energy but she’s wholly untalented in playing any character convincingly and her only real value in the role is that she fills the space. Her insistence on going overboard in either one of two directions makes her performance monotonous as there’s no variation beyond extreme joy or depression. Equally grating is the vocabulary the script arms her with. In moderation, maybe it would have had some comic appeal, but considering she spouts off a new variation of “awesometacular” or some such nonsense every few seconds, the character quickly loses its cuteness and becomes an annoying buzzing sound that dominates the rest of the film.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Despite their fantastical names, the set’s extras are actually some very bland production featurettes like cast interviews, a behind-the-scenes piece, and deleted scenes. Exactly who is expected to watch those is beyond me, as parents will want to scratch their eyes out after the first 15 minutes, and they’re a bit over the heads of the 5-year-olds to whom the film is targeted. By the time you get to the trivia game or Camryn’s music video, you’ll probably have gone into a diabetic coma.
"Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer" is on sale October 11, 2011 and is rated PG. Children & Family, Comedy. Directed by John Schultz. Written by Kathy Waugh & Megan McDonald. Starring Heather Graham, Jaleel White, Jordana Beatty, Preston Bailey, Parris Mosteller.
