CHICKEN RUN

CHICKEN RUN

Directed by Nick Park and Peter Lord. With the voices of Mel Gibson, Julia Sawalha, Miranda Richardson, Timothy Spall and Phil Daniels

"Go see chicken-movie! Go see chicken-movie!" chanted my three-year-old best mate in a paroxysm of enthusiasm and excitement on the way in - and I must confess even I was well looking forward to Chicken Run, the first full-feature flick from the men who brought you Wallace & Gromit. Its trailer seemed to promise a buzzy, quirky, animated action-flick with a summer-blockbuster quota of high-octane thrills and spills: what it actually serves up is a stiflingly boring, frustratingly conventional kids' movie with a by-numbers script and a notable lack of visual imagination. While far from being the worst ever movie of its kind, no-one should waste ninety minutes on it unless they absolutely have to.

Plot: a gang of chickens are cooped up on a high-security chicken-farm/prison/death camp, and their leader (mother-hen Ginger) keeps on coming up with novel escape plans (digging tunnels, impersonating guards etc.) to no effect. The bleak spectre of death begins to loom large over their heads when the dastardly farmer - Mrs. Tweedy - buys a machine that turns chickens into pies, and if the chicks can't learn how to fly, they are well and truly fucked.

Giving a flying fuck about any of the above is the difficult bit, since there's a complete absence of magic about the whole project, and no dramatic urgency about the way the plot develops. My young pal patiently gave Chicken Run a fair shake, but said patience was visibly wearing thin long before the movie even passed the half-way mark, and he spent the majority of the film's latter stages sprinting furiously around the Savoy in a commendable effort to give the rest of the catatonically-bored audience something to goof off. It takes 98 minutes to expire, which is fairly heavy going for a kiddy-flick, and it was with extreme weariness that I stumbled across the finishing line, fit only to fall home and climb back into my much-beloved bed.

Give it a miss.