HEY ARNOLD! THE MOVIE
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2002 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): *
Nickelodeon's HEY ARNOLD! THE MOVIE is another one of those slipshod productions delivered to the theaters in hopes of cashing in on the lucrative summer movie market for kids. Offering little more than a needlessly extended version of a mediocre television series, the movie has such little appeal that it will likely produce the same effect on your kids that it did on the tykes in our large audience -- it lulled many of them to sleep. You could see heads nodding off all over the place. Only an explosive finale woke the kids and caused a small burst of laughter.
The lead for the series is a strange looking kid named Arnold (voiced by Spencer Klein). With a "football head," yellow hair that appears parted like the Red Sea and a mouth that floats from side to side like a pair of loose dentures, Arnold is only one of many strangely drawn characters in the show.
The minimal plot provides the canonical and questionable cartoon message that businesses are always big, bad and out to exploit the environment. The story this time concerns an evil conglomerate named Future Tech Industries (FTi) that is about destroy the neighborhood. Arnold and friends try to stop FTi's CEO Scheck (voiced by Paul Sorvino) by organizing protests and even dynamiting the street in order to stop his bulldozers.
"Losers!" Arnold's friend Helga (voiced by Francesca Smith) yells at Arnold and his buddies when she gets angry at them. You'll be a loser if you chose HEY ARNOLD! THE MOVIE over much better fare like LILO & STITCH.
HEY ARNOLD! THE MOVIE runs a very long 1:16. It is rated PG for "some thematic elements" and would be acceptable for all ages.
My son Jeffrey, age 13, gave it no stars whatsoever. He said that it was seventy-six minutes of boredom and that the plot was almost non-existent.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, June 28, 2002. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the AMC and the Century theaters.
Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com
Want free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email?
Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 32186 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 732761 X-RT-TitleID: 1114598 X-RT-SourceID: 703 X-RT-AuthorID: 1271 X-RT-RatingText: 1/4
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews