Crim at the Movies: Foodfight!

Oh god...why am I even doing this?

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Foodfight! takes place in the supermarket at night after everyone has left. The grocery store transforms into a city for some reason, and from every door of this city comes two types of characters: well-known marketing icons and new characters. This movie was the brainchild of Larry Kasanoff, the director of the first Mortal Kombat movie back in the 90’s. This movie came out in 2012 with an all-star cast that includes Charlie Sheen, Wayne Brady, Hillary Duff, Eva Longoria and Christopher Lloyd (Yes, that Christopher Lloyd). This film was originally supposed to come out over a decade ago, but this seemed to just keep going. After discovering this movie, I came to understand that this movie was damn near unwatchable. No matter how bad you think it is...

...it's even worse.

This animated film is clearly being contrived as a money-making scheme. The directors must have been like "Hey, we can create a poorly constructed CGI movie and force companies pay for the celeb voices in advance by inserting their brands in the film! That must market us a profit while making this movie an absolute hit with kids and adults alike!”

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The result is this monstrosity. This movie took ten years and $65 million to make. HOW THE HELL DO YOU GET 65 MILLION DOLLARS OUT OF THIS? I’m being serious about this profit, this is ridiculous. It's so bad that while the film been stuck in production limbo for a decade and aged poorly, in that the movie was just thrown out like garbage and left to rot in the sun while it decayed. If you can make it past 20 minutes into this movie, you are a brave soul. Because that’s when things really start to become awful.

What does this animated movie appear in its final form, after a decade of work had been placed into this movie? To begin with, the animation is awful. As Animation is an interest of mine and that I wish to pursue it in a career, this is animation that looks and moves like a broken game on PlayStation 1.Hell, this looks worse than the animation in Busby 3D (And that is saying something). This basically summarizes everything what is wrong with all the modern animated CGI films that try to give this movie that “Pixar” magic, not even being close to attempting what they wished to create. The splatter and particle effects which look like they were made by a student in high school, not by a group of professionals. The characters might appear as three-dimensional but the backgrounds almost look two-dimensional. And they are both almost indistinguishable. The characters are very stiff in their movements, many of them look grotesque and ugly and the remainder of the characters just look disgusting.

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We then have the writing, or lack of writing. Sometimes, you can understand that for animation to simpily be this bad, you can forgive the animation and trust the movie for its exceptional story. But when you have been working on this movie for this amount of time, you would think the writing would be marginally polished. And despite that this is a kid’s movie, Foodfight! contains so much sexual innuendo it's ungodly and is just overall very inappropriate for children. One female character named Lady X, Eva Longoria's female Hitler styled character switching outfits between a stripper schoolgirl and fetish Nazi and seems to speak in almost entirely in grocery-store/food puns. Even then, Daredevil Dan says to the sultry Lady X in one scene, "Oh Mamacita! Yo, sweetcakes, nice packaging! How about some chocolate frosting? I'd like to butter your muffin!” This is a god-damn kid's movie. I don’t really see any sort of characters here, despite that there are plenty of characters that that are recognizable in that they are mostly real-world creations. There are just empty, hollow animated creations created with the sole purpose to say something that is apparently funny.

The CGI, the story and the one-liners all bear the mark of a complete lack of even the most rudimentary story-telling skills. What seems to pass as a narrative revolves around supermarket brands coming to life at night. Rex Dogtective (yeah, that’s his name) voiced by Charlie Sheen, mourns his lost love but must soon save his supermarket city from the evil, impersonal Brand X who are essentially food Nazi’s. With the help of ... who cares?

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This movie is essentially product-placement in it is meant to be entertainment aimed at children, and because the message that I was getting from this file amounts to nothing more than "BUY OUR BRANDS, OUR BRANDS LOVE YOU, YOU LOVE OUR BRANDS, EAT OUR FOOD, EAT, EAT, EAT, EAT, EAT..." This is just pure evil.

A fun-fact about this movie is that the biggest reason that this movie was held back for so long was that Threshold Entertainment’s (The company that made it) hard drives were stolen. Lawrence Kasanoff called it an act of "industrial espionage." To those that actually hindered the production of this movie; you have earn’t my respect for saving the intelligence of many children. I think watching twenty minutes of this movie has made me stupider.

Just look at those facial expressions....​

This movie’s very existence and eventual outcome should be a warning to those who have an idea of bold and ambitious opportunities in film. A movie seems to exist solely as a corporate byproduct, fourth-rate animation, and incredibly unforgivable and unnecessary sexual innuendos can be. The fact that Foodfight! is a bad film is an understatement, this is quite literally the worst film I have ever seen. Don't just skip this movie. Burn it and then bury it in a desolate field somewhere or pull a sledgehammer and smash the disc of this movie into total annihilation. It is that bad. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about this movie at all, an ugly mess. This is the perfect example of how NOT to make an animated movie. It isn’t even the sort of bad film that is entertaining to watch because of it’s flaws, like Birdemic (Which is at least somewhat watchable). This is just pathetic.

This movie has scored Negative One out of Five Lionheart’s