Zookeeper (Two Stars)

U.S.: Frank Coraci, 2011

Zookeeper is a Kevin James comedy of almost stupefying dopiness; a movie that, at its worst, makes you feel (to succumb for a moment to Zookeeper’s own vice of ludicrous exaggeration), as if you were sinking slowly, slowly into a huge steaming vat of vanilla pudding, while screeching monkeys swing past on vines, pissing all over you. That’s an experience I‘ve never had, of course. But then, I didn’t want to have an experience like Zookeeper, either.

It’s a movie that really shouldn’t have been as lousy as it is. The cast is good –including the very likable James as Zookeeper Griffin Keyes, and especially Rosario Dawson as his coworker Kate and Nick Nolte doing the gruff voice of a gorilla named Bernie. The production values are nice; it was shot at Boston’s beautiful Franklin Park Zoo, with very photogenic animals and animatronics. And there’s a killer under-the credits rendition of Boston’s “More than a Feeling“, sung or lip-synched by the star animals, a routine that actually beats everything in the rest of the movie.

No, scratch that. Nothing else in this movie beats Rosario Dawson, an almost insanely good-looking woman — but who has been weirdly cast here as the Zookeeper’s great good friend who‘s trying to help him out romantically by pretending to be his date to get another woman (Leslie Bibb as blonde snob Stephanie) jealous. Pretending? Wouldn‘t it make more sense if it was Griffin who pretended to be in love with Stephanie, so he could pretend he wanted to make her jealous, so he could get an actual date with Kate?

Works for me. But not in this movie. The people who made it, and especially the people who wrote it, can’t seem to decide whether they’re making a lovable kid‘s movie with a lovable zookeeper and colorful talking animals, or a hip romantic comedy about a schmo who chases after a hottie, and ends up with an even hotter hottie. Not that you can’t do both, but the five writers blamed for Zookeeper, don’t make it work and don’t make us laugh.

There are possibilities, but they usually lead nowhere. In Zookeeper’s first scene, one of its few funny ones, Griffin attempts to propose to Stephanie on the beach, on a horse, with fireworks and a mariachi band waiting to pop out and serenade and explode over them. But Steph, a money-grubber impervious to romance, ignores all that pizzazz and dumps him, before the mariachi guys even get a chance to play.

He‘s crushed. (James has a good “crushed“ expression, a kind of kicked-spaniel look of longing befuddlement.) It’s sort of funny, about as funny as this movie will get. And five years later, Griffin is till pining over Stephanie, who’s still playing the field, still moping despite the fact that he has a good job that he likes, and is surrounded by animals he likes (and who, it develops, like him a lot). He doesn’t have a mean boss — like those clowns in Horrible Bosses this week — or problems with the zoo. (That may be one of the script‘s big lacks.) And his co-worker is Dawson‘s Kate — who, I have to repeat. is so gorgeous that she can make fireworks and mariachi bands explode in your heart. (Not that Bibb isn’t gorgeous too; just not that gorgeous.)

So Griffin has to choose: Be the man Steph wants him to be: a greedy slick hustler/huckster selling luxury cars at his brother’s swanky car dealership. Or be the man he wants to be: a Zookeeper on producer Adam Sandler‘s payroll, who works with a smart, friendly knockout who looks just like Rosario Dawson, and who might just leave for Nairobi if he doesn’t make the right moves.

I know what you’re thinking. What does all this sex romantic fantasy stuff have to do with zoos or animals or Kevin James as an affable zookeeper? Well, as it turns out, the animals all speak English (though many of them probably come from Africa or other foreign lands), but only to each other and not to humans. And they decide to break their rule and start gabbing with Griffin, in order to advise him on to win Leslie.

But why do they want him to be with Leslie, who hates zoos and wants him to leave? Shouldn’t they be promoting a romance with Kate, their friend, and trying to keep her at the zoo? Why do they give such lousy advice: the bears telling him to be an alpha-bear or alpha-male, and the lions telling him to be leonine, and Don Rickles as a frog telling him to puff up his neck, and the wolf telling him to pee in an area to mark off his territory — which Griffin actually does, in a potted plant at a party?

This all struck me as ridiculous: like most of the movie, too silly for adults, too gamy for kids. The movie has another ace supposedly up its sleeve: lots of star voices for the animals, beginning with producer Adam Sandler as Donald the monkey, and continuing with Sylvester Stallone and Cher as Joe and Janet the lions, Nolte as Bernie the gorilla, Maya Rudolph as Mollie the giraffe, Jon Favreau and Faizon Love as Jerome and Bruce the bears, Bas Rutten as Sebastian the wolf, and in an unusual casting coup, producer/director/writer Judd Apatow as Barry the hyphenate-elephant.

There are other cards the writers (all five of them) keep pulling out of their deck, including Bernie’s big night at Thank God It’s Friday, with Griffin disguising him as a guy in a gorilla suit. And there are Griffin’s duels with various obnoxious fiancés of Stephanie’s (the worst scenes in the movie) and Griffin‘s attempts to become a slick super-salesman at his brother’s car dealership. (No, those were the worst scenes in the movie.)

Only the dumbest sounding one of those last three — Bernie at TGIF — actually works, and that’s partly because Nolte does such a good job as the Gorilla. He’s one of the few voice actors here who seem to realize that when you’re playing a wild beast, you have to articulate clearly instead of screeching unintelligibly (as some of them do).

The director of Zookeeper, Frank Coraci, made one of Sandler‘s best movie comedies, The Wedding Singer, as well as the more ordinary but amusing The Waterboy, and he makes this movie look good as well as move along, He just doesn’t seem able to differentiate this time between the good jokes (rare) and the bad ones (most of them). As for Kevin James, he’s an actor with such an affable persona, a plump easygoing guy who doesn’t seem to have a mean bone in his body, that it’s hard to blame him for this mess — hard to dislike him when he tries to be unlikable, as when he turns massively obnoxious car salesman, which he doesn’t do well. (He should study some slick old Eddie Albert movie villains.)

But if you spend most of the movie absorbed in Griffin’s love life, as this movie almost forces you to, instead of, say, having Griffin spend more time fighting to save his friends at the zoo, then he turns into just a big fat crybaby. Perhaps the writers think that their core audience s is the one that wants to see shlub Griffin win out with two killer babes. But I suspect that more of the audience wants to see Griffin save the zoo somehow — and get the SuperBabe in the end.

 Then again, maybe the writers could have kept their ideas, here, and just written some more funny jokes. With James, Ken Jeong (again), Sandler, Nolte, Rudolph, Rickles and the others, it shouldn’t have been hard to get them delivered. (It was, though.) Main rule: if a joke doesn’t work — and most of them here don’t — just cut to Rosario Dawson.

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