The Croods (2013) Movie Review

THE CROODS (2013) MOVIE REVIEW 

So here we have an extremely hyped up movie which stars a group of cavemen and Nicholas Cage as Himself, so does the movie live up to it? You bet it does!

The story begins with a family of cavemen who have been living inside a cave for a large time of their life as the father (voiced by Nicholas Cage) believes discovering is bad and can only lead to death. His daughter on the other hand (voiced by Emma Stone) believes in the opposite and wants to go out and explore. One day however, the odds go into her favour when she meets a man named Guy (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) who is basically like her in every way.  Then horror strikes when they learn the world is learning and in order to survive the end, all of them (especially the family) will need to learn to adapt in order to survive. All in all, the message of the movie was what really got me interested in the story as the whole message about learning to face your fears to survive can really be influential as kids especially, can easily relate to this message. If I had to gripe about one aspect of the story, it's that the end of the world (in my opinion) just comes out of thin air as Guy mentions it in between sentences. Other than this, the story was excellent, especially for an animated movie. 

When I reviewed Oz, I said that that had the best visuals in a film this year. Those dreams for that film have been all abolished. The Croods shows off what is in my eyes, the most beautiful and obscure visuals in film so far, even better than Avatar. Every creature looks like something a young child came up with. For example, towards the middle of the film there is an animal that is a mixture between an elephant and a mouse. Those two together would be expected to be a horrid mistake of nature, here, it is cute as all hell. For this, the film gets massive points for originality.

Now for the characters, and let's get this out of the way right now. Nicholas Cage steals the show. Every scene I saw the dad in, all I imagined was Cage's face and in some occasions, I burst out laughing at the shear thought of it. Besides him, there is only one character that really stands above the rest and that is Guy/Ryan Reynolds. For the majority of the movie, he actually delivered some humour appropriate for kids, but only teenagers and adults will understand. For that reason, I loved this character. Another aspect of each character was that every character was surprisingly funny in their own respects. Even the mother of the family has little funny lines sprinkled throughout.  

So overall, The Croods is a great film that both kids and adults will enjoy. While at times the movie feels it is going longer than it need to, the movie is still a blast and is the perfect family movie for the long year so far. 

RATING: 7.5/10