 Shark Tale is certainly not garnering the kind of enthusiastic reviews that Finding Nemo, another animated fish movie, did a year ago. A typical reaction is A.O. Scott's in the New York Times, who writes, "All in all, Shark Tale is reasonably good fun, even if, in the end, it's not really very interesting." Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune describes it as "standard Hollywood product. But standard product can entertain you, sometimes quite a bit, when it's done with expertise, flash and lots of stars." Similarly Chris Vognar in the Dallas Morning News comments that the movie "is just aggressively, tenaciously, average." Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe and Mail calls it "a fast-paced, star-studded, joke-stuffed piece of fast-food studio product. ... [It's] antic and cute enough for the children, with enough grownup jokes to keep the adults involved." Some reviewers are not so polite. Ty Burr in the Boston Globe describes it as "Finding Nemo gutted of all its charm and remixed for urban hit radio. Shark Tale is a film calculated to give us a good time, and it's the calculation that spoils the fun. Where Nemo was clever, soulful, and marvelous to look at, Tale is manic and surprisingly ugly, with a script that leans on the shallowest aspects of hip-hop street cred while pimping for corporate product placement at every turn." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post comments: "They say a dead fish stinks from the head first -- but the animated shipwreck Shark Tale arrives reeking all over." |
