I insist that Frankie Muniz must have naked pictures of an exec in Hollywood. Nothing else explains his continued involvement in any project. Anything short of blackmail material that would be devastating to the reputation of a high-up MGM exec would mean the two Cody Banks movies never get made. My wife pointed out that Muniz has made more money than I have. Many prostitutes have as well, I am sure. This still doesn’t change the fact that I have talent and dignity and Muniz would be out of his league in most dinner theater productions of Grease. He clearly is one of the worst actors of any generation.

As proof I offer the excruciatingly bad, talking-animal movie, Racing Stripes. Muniz gives you the impression that he’s reading his lines for the first time as he records them. He often accentuates the wrong word in a sentence, or over-emphasizes to the point of being comical. Frequently during the repeated viewings of this “film” in my house over this last weekend, I wondered if perhaps Muniz isn’t actually retarded, based on his delivery of a particular set of lines where he talks about having been picked on by the other horses since he was born. Every line he utters jolts you out of the movie, and makes you keenly aware that, inexplicably, some actors suck and yet keep getting hired.

Anyway, we soon learn that Mr. Walsh was at one time a top horse trainer until a tragic accident killed his wife and he either swore off wives or horses for good. Their daughter, Channing, immediately befriends Stripes, the cute lil’ bugger, and continues to care for him, eventually becoming his rider in the climax of the film. As he grows older, Stripes finds out he is not a race horse. Why the other animals don’t tell him this sooner makes no sense, just like why, when the race horses tell him this, it’s such a shock. Why the animals keep referring to “race horse” as though it were a breed is equally perplexing and proof that the writers did little or no research on horses or horse racing. Stripe continues living to run, as it’s “in his heart”, according to Whoopi Goldberg’s goat. Tramps like him, baby they were born to run. He races the mailman, though he hits a tree head-on. He races the top runner from the stables next door, and slips going around the turn. Perhaps zebras lack the vision and balance necessary to be top race horses? Come to think of it, you never see anyone in Africa riding zebras either. Not that I watch a lot of zebra movies or have ever been to Africa, so who knows.

The movie provides phone-in voice work for a gaggle of Hollywood Stars: Dustin Hoffman, Whoopi Goldberg, Joshua Jackson, Jeff Foxworthy, Michael Clarke Duncan, Steve Harvey, David Spade, Mandy Moore…

OK. It provides work for a lot of desperate people who need some, ANY, work besides a cameo on Crank Yankers, and an aging Hollywood Star who hasn’t done anything even approaching good since I Heart Huckabee’s, but that was a minor role. It almost makes you pine for his performance in Hook really, if one were to consider only lead roles.

Well, not really, but almost.

Anyway, continuing the trend, the dialogue is laughable- At one point Mandy Moore tells Josh Jackson and Michael Rosenbaum to “Talk to the tail, boys.” Spade’s rapping is not only an affront to rap and hip-hop but to ears in general. Somewhere in here as well is Joe Pantoliano as a goose… on the run from the goose mob or something. I can’t quite figure out why he’s there except for the idea that maybe the screenwriters watched Babe one too many times and are convinced the success of talking-animal movies hinges on fowl.

The characters are grating; Whoopi’s Zen-like goat, Hoffman’s annoying Brooklyn-esque Shetland, Snoop Dog’s nearly paralyzed hound. This has to be the easiest paycheck any of them have ever earned. Especially bothersome are Spade and Harvey’s horse flies. In one over-the-top escapade, both flies are thrown into a pile of crap. It’s a little too real and disgusting, and really out of place in a kids movie. Of course, flies in the real world do congregate in and around dung, but what’s the point of adding that level of realism to the movie other than to make me nauseas. More examples of the director’s fascination with feces is not one, but two incidents involving Pantoliano’s goose taking a flying crap onto something/someone (a horse and Wendy Malick, respectively).

The human stars, with one exception, are almost all as bad. Bruce Greenwood as the dad, Nolan Walsh, falls into and out of a Kentucky/Southern accent like drunks falling off barstools. Wendy Malick hams it up on par with John Lithgow in Santa Claus: The Movie. M. Emmet Walsh’s character is either a drunk or a problem gambler, but his performance forgets to clue us in.

In fact, the only one who doesn’t put in a border-line criminal performance is Hayden Panettiere who plays Channing Walsh, the girl who just wants to ride Stripes. She’s earnest and subtle, and seems to invest herself in the character for whatever reason. What she’s doing taking a third-rate character and movie so seriously, and to a decent result, is beyond me.

The finale to the story plays like an abandoned circus animal version of Rocky, complete with a sequence ripped straight out of Rocky IV (the one with the Russian.) Stripes, after being allowed to enter the Kentucky Open (a facsimile of the Kentucky Derby, I guess), trains at the Walsh farm by running in a cornfield and moving barrels (as Rocky trained in Jackson Hole, er…, Siberia, by running up mountains and hauling firewood) while we see Trenton's Pride, Stripe’s rival, using the best technology money can buy (like a steam suit and a treadmill- like that Russian guy does). It’s “high-tech versus heart” -- Rocky and a zebra versus some Russian guy and a horse. Instead of a Survivor song played over the montage we get a Brian Adams song played over the montage. Will Stripes, against all odds, become a race horse? Can he do it? Do we care? Will the Alpo factory take a zebra or just horses?

As a side note- someone must stop Brian Adams and Phil Collins. Never good singer-songwriters (Summer of ’69, Pseudio, anyone?) to begin with, they now make a parent’s life miserable by contributing warbling, syrupy, off-key, soft rock songs to kid’s movies. Crimes against humanity-wise, I didn’t think Adams could do worse than he did with his putrid songs from Spirit- Stallion of the Cimarron, but he manages that here. If only he would divorce his wife via fax ala Collins, he could take Phil’s kid’s movie crown.

The end result is that a stubby legged zebra is apparently a match for a racing horse because he has heart. You will wish your heart stopped, but your kids under the age of about 7 will enjoy it for no other reason than talking animals.

Video
The video is clean and nice, as one would expect from a movie this new. Frankly, I can’t get too excited about the video quality of a movie sans breasts. It looked just fine.

Audio
The English audio is fine. No complaints here. It’s nothing you’ll use to impress your friends after you buy your Bose surround sound system, but then, even if it was made for that, you wouldn’t use it. They’d laugh at you, as they should.

Extras
On the one hand, I’m going to give the producers of this disc a lot of credit- they put a nice amount of extras on the disc. On the other, I can’t for the life of me figure out who they think is going to watch/listen to them. I don’t suppose many children are itching to get at the feature length commentary by director Frederik Du Chau. It could be a veritable film school primer, but I’ll never know. I also find it hard to believe that any child would care about the never-before-seen alternate ending and deleted scenes, or the music of Racing Stripes with Sting and Bryan Adams. Or at least I hope not. And I pity any adult who desires these things. The kids will enjoy the Buzz and Scuzz's Flying Fiasco Challenge I suppose. Again, they went to a hell of an effort with the extras here based upon the movie. Some classics don’t get as nice a treatment.

Parting Thoughts
This is a movie that only fans of talking animals and the legally brain dead will enjoy.