Movie review 'Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip': The rodent trip
Cast: Jason Lee, Anna Faris, Tony Hale, Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler
Director: Walt Becker
At the airport security check en route Florida, Miles and the Chipmunks are faced with a deficiency: there is one plane ticket; there are four of them. The chipmunks decide to employ the fact of their diminutive size to their advantage: Theodore is checked into cargo; Simon hides in Miles’ underwear and Alvin is stored in his bag. When it is run through the scanner, however, the screen displays a squirrel-skeleton spread-eagled.
The security officer inquires with Miles about the aberration. In response, he holds up Alvin — who we are aware is an alive, fragile organism — and declares it to be a mere toy. He then puts up a demonstration: “It can twist, do a Linda Blair, stretch…” — all accompanied by actual, physical manipulations of Alvin’s body even as the chipmunk preserves an inert, unchanging doll-face.
It is perhaps calculated for humour, but the sequence’s inherent creepiness is not lost on the film’s writers themselves: “…a doll, huh? Chucky was a doll too,” observes the security officer and rightly so, considering it is one of the strangest, cruelest sequences in recent mainstream cinema.
It is also the only one that exhibits any self-consciousness; the rest of the film seems peculiarly bereft of any sort of acknowledgment of the oddity resident in a universe where human beings and talking squirrels hang out together (an issue addressed in the Stuart Little series, for instance).
There also seems to be no addressal of the friction between animated characters and their live-action environment. Apart from the nature of their locomotion (all four limbs), the chipmunks are rendered entirely anthropomorphic — in effect, direct proxies for actual, smartass, motor-mouthed child actors.
The Road Chip is fourth in the Alvin and the Chipmunks series.
The Chipmunks have been grounded by Dave Seville, their spiritual father. He is in love with Samantha and is on the verge of proposing to her. The Chipmunks approve of her, but not of her hostile son — puppetmaster Miles — and, therefore, forge a scheme to interrupt the romance. It cultivates a traditional, fairy-tale mythology: kind father, his castle, questions of parenthood, a stepmother, her usurper, evil stepson, but quickly settles into the traditional, Hollywood mid-level family-movie template.
In that, it distils itself through a primitive, functional discussion of a laundry-list of predetermined ideas: a family, its unity, the need to preserve its solidarity, a long, mission-shaped journey undertaken to do so, a set of artificial obstacles but ultimately, success, declarations of love and simple sentimentalism.
And yet, the film features instances of interesting writing. In the midst of all the stated aims, two secondary, male characters grapple with abandonment and rejection, which imbues the film with genuine sadness. It is also curious how gradually the story — owing to the fixed, predetermined chronology of its events — is reduced to a mere pretext, thereby enabling the filmmakers to instead pursue pleasure elsewhere. Therefore, there are wild, ridiculous digressions: a plane overrun by zoo animals mid-flight, a plethora of dance numbers, a bar-brawl, a chipmunk that flies through the air to save a boy from being hit by a car.
Each individual situation is excavated for possibilities; overwritten to its maximum, absurd level. Consider this: an air marshal walks up to a random, hirsute patron in the bar and asks to check his heavy-beard for hidden rodents. As a result, the film ultimately becomes a series of stunts, elaborate spectacles and action-sequences: much of its inherent nature is in transit, acrobatic, agile — ultimately, a series of curated sensations.
The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society
