Teenage monkey exiled on a floating piece of his former planet slinks away from his two guardians, a kung-fu deer and an obese pig mechanic, and sets out on an adventure to stop the evil domination schemes of a tiny statured monkey tyrant. SPARK: A SPACE TAIL is a boringly below average animated flick that will evaporate from any viewer's mind faster than you can say "let's kick some asteroids". Hell, the film isn't even bad enough to warrant it being labeled as the next DELGO or STRANGE MAGIC. The whole product is just a lame STAR WARS rip-off from the mediocre mind of writer/director/editor Aaron Woodley, complete with a whiny brat protagonist who looks out into space, a Darth Maul-esque lightsaber, "force" like powers, secret family relationships, a scene where the bad guy gloats over the hero while a spaceship battle goes south, and a musical score that has just enough minor note changes to keep John Williams' lawyers at bay. The only creative additions Woodley was able to think up are the fact that everyone can breath in space, wind can somehow exist in a vacuum, airlocks act like normal doors and don't actually lock out air, star destroyers operate just like sea battleships in space, and that black holes and worm holes are one and the same. Actually no, there is just one ingenious creation featured here by Mr. Woodley: the "space kraken", a giant space creature that acts as the film's MacGuffin and isn't a squid at all but actually a humpback whale with a mollusk shell and several wing-like tendrils that literally shits out black holes. The animation is cheap looking but decent enough for a $40 million Canadian-Korean production and some of the actors, namely Jessica Biel and Patrick Stewart, do their best but none of it can truly compensate for the ho-hum story, weak comedy, and unnecessary littering of pop songs.
FINAL REVIEW: 2 / 5
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