"Racing Stripes" is rated PG for crude humor, including flatulence and excrement gags and references to bodily functions, violence (mostly slapstick and some off-screen animal violence) and scattered use of profanity (most of it mild). None of their contributions are particularly funny, but it's the crude shtick provided by Steve Harvey and David Spade as a pair of wisecracking flies that takes the film from being merely annoying to excruciating. The rest of the talking-animal menagerie includes Whoopi Goldberg as a goat, Jeff Foxworthy as a rooster and Joe Pantoliano as a pelican. But the filmmakers stoop so low in their attempts to get laughs that it's all for naught. Shattered illusions are hard to repair - especially for a good-hearted zebra named Stripes whos spent his life on a Kentucky farm amidst the sorely mistaken notion that hes a debonair thoroughbred. It's not a horrible idea for a movie, and the human cast is appealing. And Stripes does receive some "training" from a Shetland pony named Tucker (voiced by Dustin Hoffman), which just might give him a chance. And even though the colt does have some actual speed, Nolan refuses to let his daughter ride it because of a past tragedy and because of the sheer silliness of the idea. His daughter, Channing (Hayden Panetierre), adopts the animal and names it Stripes.īut as Stripes grows up, he begins harboring aspirations to become a racer (at this point, the character is voiced by Frankie Muniz). That story concerns a new arrival in the Walsh family, Midwestern farmers whose patriarch, Nolan (Bruce Greenwood), finds a zebra colt that's been accidentally abandonedīy a traveling circus. There's a perfectly fine little story - albeit a predictable one - that tries to emerge from all the crassness. The real pity here is that none of this was necessary. If that's not bad enough, the movie also features a nearly nonstop barrage of flatulence and bird-droppings gags, accompanied by some dubious humor involving racial and ethnic stereotypes. The whole film is a textbook example of how little creativity goes into live-action kids' movies these days. The talking-animals gimmick has already been done to death, and this live-action comedy drives the joke into the ground. It's the first time one of the film's animal characters speaks. It's easy to pinpoint the exact moment when "Racing Stripes" goes off the track.
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