Home is where you want to be instead of watching this film

On a rainy day we went to the movies to see Home.  Home is the animated story of Oh, an alien whose species invades Earth. The species, the Boov, move all of the humans to special districts where they have live and where you wish you could go about midway through the film.

Home is the kind of family friendly film that gives good family friendly films a bad reputation. Just because a film is good for the family doesn’t make it good, and Home is proof of that. Every film doesn’t have to be a Toy Story home run, but at least make it entertaining enough so that audiences over five won’t be daydreaming about what they could’ve been doing.

Our oldest, who is five did have moments where he enjoyed the film.  Not surprisingly they were the bits featured in the trailer about not eating the blue mints in the bathroom and not liking the lemonade in the same room. Sadly, the potty humor isn’t even enough to salvage this utter waste of time.

Home is 112 minutes-and it is a long 112 minutes at that. Just over halfway through I looked around the theater to see if anyone was laughing and it was as if My Dinner With Andre was on screen.  Immediately to my son’s right was a teenage who, if he were a cartoon with speech bubbles would’ve been saying “I want to see Furious 7 instead of this”.

Jim Parsons is the voice of Oh, a Boov whose character and inflection is a direct extension of his intonations on Big Bang. The Boov speak like Jar Jar Binks, in a broken English manner that make you want to put all of those characters on your son’s tee-ball stand and whap them off screen. Rihanna is the voice of Tip, a human who befriends Oh.  Her voice is serviceable, could’ve been done better by any number of voice-over actors and could possibly be in the movie only to use three of her songs in it.

Steve Martin is Captain Smek the leader of the Boov.  He’s OK, but doesn’t stand out and is probably only here due to a touring banjo break.  The problem with Home is the story.  It’s simple, paint by the numbers fare that studios put out to entertain families who might be accustomed to every animated feature being excellent. By the time that the films’ villain, who really turns out to be the good guys appear you’ll be wishing for a quick annihilation.