Despite a Spirited Voice Performance from Nicolas Cage, 2009's G-Force is a 92 Minute Headache
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As part of the massive press blitz for The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent Nicolas Cage recently said that despite what people might think, in the past decade he’s never phoned it in and has done some of the best work of his career.
It seems safe to assume that the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced 2009 secret agent guinea pig cartoon G-Force does not represent a passion project for the actor. It’s the furthest thing from a labor of love but Cage is such a glorious weirdo that I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it because he actually knew a talking guinea pig who begged him to do the film as his dying wish.
The role of Speckles, a hyper-intelligent star-nosed mole with a dark secret in G-Force is a quintessential paycheck part but Cage finds a way to infect it with his bonkers personality all the same.
In a perverse meta gag, Cage gives the technologically adept critter the same nasal whine as the teenaged dirtbag he played in Peggy Sue Got Married. Acting is all about choices.
Cage’s primary move here, beyond impishly recycling one of his least popular actorly decisions, involves communicating as if he’s pinching his nose while he talks.
G-Force inspires groans and eye rolls instead of laughter but I legitimately guffawed at Cage’s delivery of “I have no quarrel with you, human! But mankind must pay!”
Speckles disappears from the film for a long stretch before he comes back in a form both bad and bad-ass. His super-villain origin story is impressively bleak but if Cage put real thought and effort into his performance, seemingly no one else did, with the exception of Steve Buscemi, who steals scenes as a manic hamster paranoid that people will think he’s a ferret and Jon Favreau as an affable everyman rodent.
In G-Force, a group of highly skilled talking animals overseen by scientist Ben Kendell (Zack Galifinakis, too dispirited to even do his shtick)) help keep our nation safe. Sam Rockwell voices Darwin, the guinea pig leader of G-Force, with an air of quiet resignation that betrays that he knows damn well that no amount of energy, personality or improvisation can redeem the role or the film.
When even a performer as inventive and exciting as Sam Rockwell seems defeated by a role and a film, the movie has a huge problem. Rockwell is merely underwhelming. His guinea pig costars, however, are actively obnoxious.
Penelope Cruz plays Juarez, a sexy-ass guinea pig whose gender and sexuality are referenced pretty much every moment she’s onscreen. Even when Juarez is complaining about being dolled up in cartoonishly girly fashion she’s still seeing the world exclusively through the prism of being a woman.
In her case at least the “G” in “G-Force” stands for “gendered.” Tracy Morgan, meanwhile, is unbearable as Blaster, a weapons specialist with the personality of a stereotypical sassy black guy from the 1980s.
Juarez has two love interests in Blaster and Darwin. Why does a cartoon about guinea pig secret agents for children have a love triangle? Do these rodents need to be sexualized?
You can always tell when an actor or voiceover artist has been given complete freedom to do whatever the hell they want, to ad-lib and improvise and wisecrack in a doomed, failed attempt to try to create comedy and life in a massive void.
That’s Morgan here. The 30 Rock cut-up devolves into insufferable self-parody as he tosses out slang and pop culture references that were embarrassing at the time of the film’s release and have only gotten lamer in the ensuing thirteen years.
G-Force takes us on a crappy carpet ride back to the tackiest recesses of the late oughts, and not just because it contains MULTIPLE Black Eyed Peas songs.
Remember Pimp My Ride, Paris Hilton’s chihuahua and Tony Montana’s “Say hello to my little friend” catchphrase from Scarface? Then you’re in luck, and may indulgently give the movie a meek chuckle of recognition it does not deserve when it references all three.
For about ten minutes in its third act G-Force unexpectedly becomes, if not “good” necessarily, then at least guilty fun. A lazy and under-achieving dud finally begins to realize its tremendous potential as freaky-ass shit to watch while you’re super-baked.
Speckles does a heel turn. It turns out he faked his death and is behind the sinister plan to weaponize electronic gizmos and bring about hell on earth as punishment for the brutal murder of his family.
Speckles roars out of the earth in a fantastical mechanical contraption while refrigerators and whatnot wage war against humanity at the deranged mole’s insistence.
I also love the dad joke goofiness of making the mole a mole in more ways than one.
I’m not sure that I would have enjoyed G-Force under any circumstances but I suspect I would have liked it more if I hadn’t just ran a Fractured Mirror piece on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and wrote up Cats Don’t Dance for the Fractured Mirror book.
All live-action/animation movies pale in comparison to Who Framed Roger Rabbit but G-Force looks particularly feeble alongside it. G-Force doesn’t just suck compared to one of the best movies ever made: it blows compared to a modest but enjoyable trifle like Cats Don’t Dance, which has all of the world-building, elegant character design and fun animation G-Force desperately lacks.
G-Force has no personality, vision or sense of what it wants to be beyond busy nonsense for small children. Yet Cage nevertheless found a way to invest himself and his artistry into a loud, clattering contraption otherwise devoid of spirit and soul.
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