Animated feature is a real turkey of a ‘toon

Starring voices of Owen Wilson, Woody Harrelson, Amy Poehler, Keith David and Colm Meaney. Directed by Jimmy Hayward.

Rated PG for some action / peril and rude humor. At xxx theaters. 1 hour, 31 minutes.

Bottom line: Sorely lacking in laughs

By Roger Moore

McClatchy-Tribune

“Free Birds”€ is more proof, as if 2013 needed it, that Hollywood has almost killed the animated goose that laid the golden egg.

No matter that in this case, the goose is a turkey. You didn’t need to be told that. But a year that has produced the clever and heartfelt “The Croods” and the passably amusing “Despicable Me 2” has also had a healthy dose of sausage factory about it. “Epic,”€ “Monsters University,”€ “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2”€ and “Turbo”€ — all major pictures that hint at a talent pool spread absurdly thin and an industry with sneering contempt for its audience.

Owen Wilson, Woody Harrelson, Amy Poehler and George Takei — funny folks, one and all. Yet there’s barely a laugh in it.

Wilson voices Reggie, a scrawny Jeremiah at his turkey farm, the one guy to figure out why he and his flock are being fattened up. “Turkeys are dumb,”€ he narrates as his peers clap as friends and family are dragged off to “turkey paradise.”€

But Reggie is that lucky bird who wins a presidential pardon. The gag writers thought it would be cute to make this Southern president with the bratty daughter Clintonian. Hellooo, 1996.

Reggie has barely settled into a pampered life of pizzas and TV watching at Camp David when the demented Jake (Harrelson) shows up to birdnap him and enlist Reggie in his mission — to steal the secret Camp David time machine, travel back to early America and change Thanksgiving history, “to get turkey OFF the menu.”€

In 1621 Plymouth, the Pilgrims are starving — save for the portly Gov. Bradford (Dan Fogler). Myles Standish (Colm Meaney) is a trigger-happy menace who figures he can turkey-hunt the colony to safety.

The few gags there are seem borrowed from better, earlier films — short attention span turkeys inspired by Dory of “Finding Nemo,”€ “Braveheart”€ battle scenes, mismatched “buddies”€ from a hundred better buddy comedies.

The odd throw-away line works. The president’s daughter is a 6-year-old blabbermouth who blurts out to Reggie that this general “has issues”€ and that overweight maid “eats her feelings.”€ And Gov. Bradford is forever minimizing his responsibility for the dying colonists.

But the sight gags fall flat and much of the screenplay seems like a rough draft that the filmmakers expected the actors to fix. And they didn’t.

Casting Takei as the time machine will amuse adults. Giving him little more than his catch-phrase to say won’t.

Frozen, under-cooked and sorely lacking much in the way of “all the trimmings,” this turkey isn’t ready to serve.