Ice Age franchise helmer Carlos Saldanha has teamed with Big Momma’s House 2 and Deck the Halls scripter Don Rhymer to essentially take Pixar’s Finding Nemo and mash it up with Dreamworks’ Madagascar and call it Rio. Fascinating enough, mathematically it all works out. You take Nemo, which was a ten, and Madagascar, which was a four, add those up for 14, divide by two and you get Rio, which is a seven. It really is all about the math.
Rio is the story of Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg), a rare macaw living in snowy Minnesota who’s asked to return to his home in Rio de Janero where he will be matched up with Jewel (voiced by Anne Hathaway) and asked to help propagate the species. The situation goes bad when Jewel and Blu are kidnapped and soon find themselves in a wild chase across the lush and scenic landscape of Brazil.
The intended romantic connection between Jewel and Blu aside, the story finds additional narrative in familiar details. Just as Nemo wasn’t a fast swimmer and just as the animals in Madagascar weren’t familiar with life outside of their comfortable zoo confines, Blu can’t fly and he’s too domesticated for the wilds of Rio as his father Marlin, excuse me, his owner Linda (Leslie Mann) searches for him.
As Jewel and Blu rush around, the inevitable side characters pop up. They run into a Hornbill voiced by George Lopez (because Lopez has to voice a character in every animated film that takes place south of the border), a hip-hop pair of birds voiced by Jamie Foxx and will.i.am and the most entertaining of the bunch, a drooling bulldog voiced by Tracy Morgan.
All of this is presented in 3D, which really adds very little to the feature if anything. I can’t honestly remember a moment where I was particularly wowed by the visuals, but I did notice they managed to fit in several shots of the “Christ the Redeemer” statue, which is probably a prerequisite for setting your story in Rio.
Other aspects of the film are similarly mundane, such as the songs, none of which particularly strike a chord or raise your eyebrows. The animation also felt extremely ordinary and when it came to Jewel’s owner Tulio (voiced by Rodrigo Santoro), his appearance down to his elongated head reminded me only of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. To that effect, the relationship that forms between Linda and Tulio is strikingly similar to the one found between the two leads in Cloudy. Yeah, the similarities to previous films are abundant, which is to say Rio is seriously lacking inventiveness.
But I don’t want to sound like I’m coming down too hard on this film. It’s a perfectly decent family film. It’s colorful, has a few comedic characters, the line “Birds versus monkeys!” is a definite winner, a sinister cockatoo named Nigel voiced by the consistently entertaining Jemaine Clement (“The Flight of the Conchords”) is spot on and I was thankful the story continued to move and never stagnates. However, it’s just too simple and without much risk. Eisenberg and Hathaway don’t necessarily bring much to their characters. Eisenberg especially is too lifeless and one-note to ever give his character much verve.
Families should be perfectly satisfied with Rio and I know there was at least one woman in my audience cackling over my right shoulder as if she was watching the funniest movie she’d ever seen. Personally it just didn’t move me the same way. It lacks an identity as comparisons to other animated films are far too noticeable and frequent and when it does make an attempt to differentiate itself it only achieves middling results.
