| By Marshall Fine "Osmosis Jones" is film about bodily fluids, which should be right up the alley of bad-taste mavens Peter and Bobby Farrelly ("There's Something About Mary"). Still, having made their name with boundary-busting R-rated fare, the most daring thing the Farrelly brothers can do these days is make a PG-rated film, which they've done with "Osmosis Jones." What's surprising is not the family-friendly direction but, rather, just how funny it isn't. It's not difficult to see what they were going for, in this comedy that blends live-action and animation, though rarely in the same frame. The idea of a cartoon with a white blood cell as a cop battling viruses sounds intriguing, and the notion of Bill Murray as that blood cell's host body is also promising. Instead, "Osmosis Jones" suffers from a limp script that is at once too esoteric and too inane for its own good. Murray looks as though he shot all of his scenes in two days, but that doesn't explain the flat, laughless lines that befuddle voice actors Chris Rock and David Hyde Pierce. Rock is Osmosis Jones, a hip-talking undercover white blood cell, who's been reassigned to mouth duty after triggering the panic button on his host, Frank (Murray), causing him to vomit up a germ. But Jones gets more than he bargained for when Frank, a zookeeper, picks up a hard-boiled egg off the floor of the chimp cage and eats it, applying his 10-second rule: anything on the ground less than 10 seconds is still edible. Among the germs that enter Frank's system is a particularly nasty virus named Thrax (Laurence Fishburne), who is bent on nothing less than shutting Frank down for good with a killer fever. The film's jokes are weak and there's nothing Rock can do to punch them up. He doesn't even get to explain his name. "Osmosis Jones" is like a hip health-class film gone wrong, a film that can barely rise to the level of juvenile humor. Published 08.09.01 |
