Review

Open Season
Director(s): Roger Allers, Jill Culton
Writer(s): Steve Bencich , Ron J Friedman   
Cast: Martin Lawrence, Ashton Kutcher
Genre: Animation/Adventure
Rating: PG
Runtime: 99mins
Tagline: One Fur All & All Fur One.

I know what you’re thinking: Martin Lawrence as a wise-cracking, fart-obsessed, animated bear — they’ve finally created the movie from hell. But Open Season, a facile yet good-natured CGI kiddie-pleaser, turns out to be an unexpectedly torture-free prospect, and while it’s no Jungle Book — and Lawrence is no Baloo — it’s a step up from the lentil-brained likes of Madagascar and Shark Tale. There’s a beating heart and a story to follow here, not just a dated-by-yesterday grab bag of pop-cultural allusions.
In what may depressingly be the best role of his career, Lawrence plays Boog, a domesticated circus bear who finds himself stranded in the mountains three days before hunting season. His only saviour is Elliot (Ashton Kutcher, surprisingly OK), a klutzy and hyperactive deer with one antler missing, who helps Boog navigate his way through the terrors of the forest (trigger-happy hunters, mischievous beavers, a maniacally unfunny squirrel voiced by Billy Connolly) to find his way home.
Ropey gags aside (and there are plenty of them) everything moves at a brisk pace, and the songs, by ex-Replacements singer Paul Westerberg, are astonishingly lovely. (Westerberg’s Good Day, a tribute to late Mats guitarist Bob Stinson, is used here to accompany a scene featuring a 600-pound grizzly bear being dangled from a cartoon helicopter. Oddly enough, it works.) Open Season may not compete with Toy Story 2 in the children’s DVD shelves of the future, but it beats the pants off Big Momma’s House. 
—  Paul Isaacs