Unfunny ‘Yogi Bear’ is just unbearable

December 17, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Movie

Yogi Bear

Jellystone Park has been losing business, so greedy Mayor Brown decides to shut it down and sell the land. That means families will no longer be able to experience the natural beauty of the outdoors -- and, even worse, Yogi and Boo Boo will be tossed out of the only home they've ever known. Faced with his biggest challenge ever, Yogi must prove that he really is "smarter than the average bear" as he and Boo Boo join forces with their old nemesis Ranger Smith to find a way to save Jellystone Park from closing forever.

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By Roger Moore

Orlando Sentinel

Yogi always was “smarter than the average bear.” But parents and grandparents dragging tykes along to the 3D big screen “Yogi Bear” will probably remember him as funnier than the average bear, too. Or funnier than this.

A computer animated Yogi and Boo Boo inhabit a real-world Jellystone Park with the unfunny Tom Cavanagh as Ranger Smith and nothing-funny-to-play Anna Faris as the ranger’s love interest.

The 3D in this film from the director of “Journey to the Center of the Earth” (Eric Brevig) is used to hurl soft drinks, water skis and the contents of various pic-a-nic baskets into the viewer’s lap. Brilliant.

And Yogi and Boo Boo? They’re passably voiced by Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake, two actors given virtually no amusing lines in the multi-writer script (a “Wild Hogs” alumnus among them). “Pic-a-nic baskets may be delicious on the lips, but they’re a lifetime on the hips” is what passes for a zinger, here. Yogi-Aykroyd can proclaim, “My melon is full-a smart juice,” but anybody over the age of four is going to think, “And?”

With Cavanagh, an actor going for the indoor record for most TV series canceled underneath him, as the bears’ foil, you know this isn’t going to sink or swim based on charm, charisma or dazzling repartee between him and digital bears. Kid-friendly sight-gags and slapstick must carry the day — Yogi water-skiing, Yogi and Boo Boo flying a basket-snatching glider, Yogi building assorted other basket-catapulting devices. There’s not a laugh in the lot.

Faris, the once-and-future “House Bunny,” hints at a promising direction this might have taken. She’s a nature-nut documentary filmmaker who has lived with orangutans and assorted other critters and speaks “Brown Bear.” Instead of hanging with her, we follow the evil mayor who somehow has gotten the deed to Jellystone National Park and plans to close the money-losing facility and clear cut the place.

Unless Yogi, the Ranger, Boo Boo and filmmaker Rachel can save the day, of course.

Weak as they’ve been, the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” movies are operating on a higher plane than this. The best you can say about this “Yogi Bear” is that he’s harmless. No animal was harmed in the making of this picture except the one Hanna-Barbera made a bundle on almost 50 years ago.