Home (2015)

RATING: D-

Dreamworks Animation has their ups and downs. They are well capable of producing fantastic animated films that any age can enjoy like the How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda films, and yet they are also capable of putting out steaming piles of garbage like Madagascar 2 or Shrek the Third. Home (which is all too simplistic a movie title) is unfortunately set to join the lowest tier of their movies. 

This film centers around a group of weird aliens called the Boov who are looking for a safe planet to hide from their enemy the Gorg; and just so happen to settle on Earth. One member of the Boov, named "Oh" (yes, that is seriously his name; I am not making this crap up), who is a more freethinking Boov, accidentally sends out a signal that will alert the Gorg to their location. He becomes a fugitive, and ends up teaming up with a teenage girl named Tip (again, I am not making this up) who is trying to find her missing mother. And thus begins the adventure of two unlikely friends. 

This little Dreamworks film manages to be stupid and annoying in about as many ways as it can come up with. The Boov are a fairly creative thing; but they have some issues, namely their unapologetic appalling grammar ("Look! I has found our car"). It's sort of funny at first, but it gets old fast. And the clash of alien cultures goes from boring to annoying fairly quick. Tip herself is just an annoying character as well (probably didn't help that she was voiced by Rihanna). Probably the only remotely enjoyable character is Captain Smek, leader of the Boov--and that is really only because of a couple funny gags involving what happens when he uses Earth objects for different things than they are intended for. 

As for the plot? ...I mean, it's not horrible, but it just gets so far lost under the annoying characters, the laughably bad script, and the terrible pop soundtrack. There is a somewhat decent plot twist at the end, but that happens at the cost of the threatening air of the "villain." We spend much of the rest of the movie with Tip and Oh, two characters who I don't particularly care about. 

To be fair, the little ones will probably enjoy it and find it cute. However, I find it hard to see who else will like this. There's very little that's actually appealing about this; and what little decent humor there is (what was shown in the marketing that got me mildly interested in this in the first place) is run into the ground so quick that it's not even really funny anymore. It tries to be decent, but the fact of the matter is Home is a ludicrous animated flick. Dreamworks is capable of far better, and it makes me all the more frustrated that it's films like this that keep making us wait longer for How to Train Your Dragon 3.