Shaun the Sheep Movie

2015  PG  ANIMATED  1h 25min

CAST— Justin Fletcher, John Sparkes, Omid Djalili

MUSIC— Ilan Eshkeri  DIRECTORS— Mark Burton, Richard Starzak  BASED ON— Characters appearing on Shaun the Sheep (television)

     A super silly, though humorless attempt at comedy. Shaun is a sheep, living a life of dull routine, day after day, year after year. What he needs is a vacation, to get away from it all, to forsake the monotony, if only temporarily. Shaun hatches a plan to get his farmer to unwittingly lend the farmhouse to the sheep. But when do plans ever work out, right? The farmer ends up in The Big City with amnesia and the sheep, aided by the farmer’s loyal canine companion, begin a quest to rescue the farmer. But they’d best beware; a maniacal animal control officer is on the lookout for anything unusual, and that scrap of wool looks mighty suspicious. While the farmer (still memory-impaired) makes a name for himself in a chic salon (shearing human hair as he would a shaggy sheep) the barnyard brethren must evade animal control in their attempts to rescue the farmer and return to their tedious life. The film tries to give its all but becomes as boring as Shaun’s farmyard existence. Some snappy dialogue may have livened things up. But alas, there is no dialogue, snappy or otherwise; the characters mumble gibberish throughout, as if they’ve received speech therapy from Rowan Atkinson. At least Mr. Bean was funny.

OUR RATING— * ½