Babe: Pig in the City

When your hero is a dinner-table staple, it's hard to make a comedy that's not a little dark. The problem with Babe: Pig in the City, however, isn't that it's dark but that it's murky. Pressured no doubt by the huge, unexpected success and Academy Award nominations (Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, among others -- it won for Visual Effects) of his original, director George Miller has hammed up his sequel into a $90 million stew with an unsettling share of ill-mixed, half-baked, and sometimes indigestible ingredients.

The main course barely survives. A bit more petulant than before, the undaunted sheepherding pig must accompany Mrs. Hoggett (Magda Szubanski) to a state fair to cash in on his fame when Farmer Hoggett (John Cromwell) falls down a well, incapacitating himself and leaving the farm prey to bank creditors. The well scene is disturbing enough, but when Mrs. Hoggett gets pulled aside for a strip search at the airport, it's easy to see why the MPAA demanded a re-edit for a "G" rating. Why the filmmakers agreed is another matter -- the result is a motley collection of some scenes that go too far, some that don't go far enough, others that go nowhere at all.

Stranded in the city (which is a morphed and matted composite of metropolises from Paris to New York to Batman's Gotham City), the pig and his mistress seek refuge at a hotel inhabited by a grotesque clown (Mickey Rooney, whose appearance is mercifully brief and wordless) and his circus troupe of primates, who are cohabiting with tightly structured societies of foundling dogs and cats (the cats have formed a choir). With such characters as the mandarin-like orangutan Thelonious (voiced by James Cosmo), the street-smart poetic chimp Bob (Steven Wright), and the surreal little mutt Flealick (Adam Goldberg), whose paralyzed back end is attached to wheels, this set-up almost achieves that irresistible imaginary world, somewhere between daydream and nightmare, that is the gift of the best children's fiction.

But the authorities and bad plotting intrude, with chases and births and colored balloons, and the film takes on the bloated air of Miller's The Witches of Eastwick. Although touched with moments of hilarity, pathos, and otherworldliness, this Pig in the City has lost its way.

-- Peter Keough