Underdog

 

*/****     UNDERDOG (PG)

In the 1960s, W. Watts Biggers, Tread Covington, Chet Stover and artist Joe Harris teamed together to create the television cartoon series Underdog as a new way of advertising breakfast cereal for their account General Mills. The character of Underdog was a superhero parody of Superman involving an average beagle who would sneak into a telephone booth and transform into a costumed crime fighter when trouble appeared. Several years later, Underdog receives an update and some slight character changes in the Walt Disney Pictures live action adaptation in 2007.

A mad scientist named Simon Barsinister (Peter Dinklage) has masterminded a mysterious lab experiment that has inadvertently provided an ordinary Beagle named Shoeshine (Jason Lee) with an unparalleled amount of superpowers. Shoeshine manages to escape from the laboratory and Barsinister, and is soon befriended and adopted by a local police officer named Dan Unger (James Belushi), who decides to bring Shoeshine home for his lonely 12-year old son Jack (Alex Neuberger).

The bond between Jack and Shoeshine becomes much greater once Jack realizes that Shoeshine can communicate with humans, and that he possesses incredible superpowers. Shoeshine develops a secret identity as Underdog, a crime-fighter who dons a superhero outfit and protects citizens and animals alike from unforeseen tragedies. But Barsinister and his henchman Cad (Patrick Warburton) soon concoct a plan to capture Underdog and use his extraordinary abilities to destroy the city.

A family-friendly live action flick that doesn’t quite add up to the cheap delightfulness experienced when viewing the original low-budget animated series, Underdog is an average kiddie film that flounders through foolish jokes on its way towards delivering a half-hearted positve message. For the most part the movie stays to true to the cartoon, but writers Joe Piscatella, Adam Rifkin (Zoom, Small Soldiers) and Craig Williams fail to play up the satire in the character, and instead recycle material from several family-oriented films.

The writers do a good job at keeping the story moving and the audience’s attention focused on Underdog, but too many characters and storylines are tossed about and left isolated in the end. Similar to this year’s earlier Firehouse Dog, Underdog jumbles several misshapen pieces together that fill time and send us from one slapstick scenario to another, but never clearly defines for us who these characters are, why they are involved in the situations they are and the reasons for their actions.

Most of the acting in the film is rather bland, with neither Belushi (The Wild, TV’s According to Jim), Dinklage (Find Me Guilty, TV’s Nip/Tuck) or Warburton (Happily N’Ever After, TV’s Kim Possible) electing to go over-the-top ala Tim Allen in The Shaggy Dog, but the three also play it too straight and safe for this action-comedy. And Lee’s (Clerks II, TV’s My Name is Earl) great voice-work from The Incredibles and Monster House is practically nonexistent here, burried beneath his affable delivery.

A listless summer movie, Underdog’s cute antics feel much better suited for a half-hour series on the Disney Channel than they do as a Walt Disney Pictures big-screen offering.