Wild America

Bomb Rating: 

Sure enough, the director turns out to be William Dear, the man responsible for such tragedies as "Timerider," "Harry and the Hendersons" and "Angels in the Outfield."

All I could think about while watching "Wild America," the supposed real-life childhood adventures of wildlife filmmakers Marty (Scott Bairstow), Mark (Devon Sawa) and Marshall Stouffer (Jonathan Taylor Thomas), was that it at least must be exciting for whatever clueless old guy is directing it.

Sure enough, the director turns out to be William Dear, the man responsible for such tragedies as "Timerider," "Harry and the Hendersons" and "Angels in the Outfield." Here, he follows the all too common Hollywood approach to films for kids: "Since kids can't comprehend real-life adventure, let's make everything look really fake."

Instead of telling a simple story and letting the natural suspense of each situation (like being chased by an alligator) run its course, Dear adds all kinds of implausible crap. During the alligator scene it isn't enough that Marshall is in a swamp with an alligator -- he has to accidentally throw his flashlight in the creature's mouth to boot. After Marshall almost drowns, the kids run into Danny Glover, who disappears like some kind of ghost. In their search for a bear cave they meet a woman who's had half her face gnawed off. In the bear cave, just before they're about to be eaten, they sing the bears to sleep, though you can barely hear them over the groans from the youthful audience.

To spread the word about this Wild America review on Twitter.

To get instant updates of Mr. Cranky reviews, subscribe to our RSS feed.
0 Comments

Like This Wild America Review? Vote it Up.

0

Rate This Movie:

Other Cranky Content You Might Enjoy

  • Similarities between holiday movies are often startling.

  • WARNING: SPOILERS.

    For revealing the spoilers, I'd like to apologize less for myself and more for the filmmakers who have forced me to give away some of the film's secrets because they're incompete

  • After Martin Landau tried to put most of America to sleep with his Oscar speech for "Ed Wood" in 1995, somebody's light-bulb-for-a-brain went off in Hollywood and t

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <img> <blockquote> <p> <br> <br /> </p> <img />
  • You may quote other posts using [quote] tags.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.