Owen Wilson as a Time Travelling Turkey? How can that not be so horrendously awful it’s good? Simple. It’s “The Year of Standards” in animated movies. So let’s make the beginning and end of the movie horrendously hilarious and make the rest… meh. But I’m getting ahead of myself, what’s the story? Owen Wilson… Oh wait I’m sorry I mean the totally distinguishable character of Reggie the Turkey is named the “pardoned Turkey” by the president of the United States.
Being the pardoned Turkey means Owen can just chill at the President’s house eating pizza, watching soap operas, and forcing as many “lone wolf” references until you can start to feel the blunt obviousness bashing into your brain. That is until a roided up Turkey named Jake (Woody Harrelson) kidnaps him and takes him to the US’s secret time machine by the order of the GREAT TURKEY. PS. This is a time travel movie so can you guess what the “twist” is and who the Great Turkey is? You can? Fantastic! You can guess the insultingly obvious. So under orders by the Great Turkey, Jake and Owen go back in time to stop the first thanksgiving and “get turkey off the menu.”
From that, half of you are obviously going “That sounds awful but maybe I’ll see it to just riff on it.” Yeah… don’t do that. While I admit I had a ton of fun riffing on the beginning 15 minutes and the ending 15 minutes, everything in between is just vanilla. There’s a tribe of Turkey natives, selfish MAN hunting turkeys due to a food shortage, an evil cowboy and… just picture the turkey version of Avatar and you have this movie.
On the animation side today’s film is by Reel FX the people behind the classic movie nobody remembers, Everyone’s Hero, Open Season 2 and 3, and the animation for The Simpsons Ride at Universal, so these guys have been around and there style is what I would call flat but manageable. Nothing visually stunning, the colors are bright but blandly implemented and overall it’s an aspect viewers would usually overlook. But in defense of Free Birds, I can say that the animation is pretty good, the colors aren’t as blandly implemented as usual and in one scene in particular where the humans burn down the Turkey Natives’ home, it’s like a scene straight out of Watership Down. The harsh lighting, and the use of oranges, reds and contrasting blues is great. But to also be fair to the film’s detractors, the dog models this movie has look like complete ass. In the end Free Bird’s animation is just a mix bag.
When it comes to writing however, it’s all in the bullcrap bag but the quality of the crap changes throughout the movie. The ending being the peak of complete ridiculous crap. Usually I don’t like to spoil movies but in this case you just have to hear how the day is saved. First we have the native turkeys attacking the humans with flaming pumpkins and spears, and then the humans fire cannon balls at them, and as they are right about to hit them the time machine appears and creates a wormhole sucking everything up. Including our evil cowboy who gets sucked into the wormhole and probably has each and every one of his molecules erased from existence in excruciating agony. HOORAY!
But now with the villain dead how will Owen Wilson make the humans decided to not eat turkey. By giving them all pizza. That’s right. The day is saved because of pizza. It’s the most stupid and outrageous ending that I almost want to say the movie is worth it just for that. But no, do not. Free Birds is a putrid pile of crap that tries to be incredibly silly, revert to being boringly standard and then revert back to silly. It’s a plain mess that kids and adults will be bored off. Well at least now Thanksgiving can join Chanukah (Eight Crazy Nights) in the awful holiday movie gang.
Taylor Wyatt DC Blog 
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