Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Chris Rock and Frasier Crane’s brother are buddy cops protecting a Ghostbuster from an evil Laurence Fishburne while a corrupt mayor William Shatner interferes with their work. Did you get the movie? No? Well that’s because that’s the premise for the poorly received “Osmosis Jones,” a rare mix of real-life action and cartoony goodness that you only see from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and select others. It depicts all human beings as essentially bustling metropolises of sentient cells, with the main character of Chris Rock ironically playing a white character…a white blood cell to be specific, which is akin to law enforcement in our world. The city he calls his beat is actually Bill Murray, who is a total health SLOB! For crying out loud, his diet is atrocious and the plot is kicked off when he eats a hard-boiled egg that had been stolen from a chimpanzee and dropped within the creature’s cage at the zoo. Of course disgusting germ-types would be crawling all over the less-than-edible so pretty soon a new kind of virus, played as some sort of smooth gangster by Laurence Fishburne, begins to wreak havoc in the ol’ voice of Garfield. As most people do when sick, they pop pills. The pill is actually introduced as a sort of Iron-Man-esque cyborg with a gun for an arm, posh mannerisms, and being roughly the size of a really large cell with the rest of the pill being explained away as sugar and cherry flavoring. So after plenty of the typical buddy-cop mismatching misadventures, the virus cracks down and pretty much kills the former Ghostbuster with the intent of spreading to his daughter. But after a slickly animated fight scene in the daughter’s eyeball (don’t ask how they get there…this is not the movie for germophobes) the villain is vanquished by falling into a beaker of alcohol (proof that hand sanitzer can be super-effective) and the day is saved when the hero returns the Mcguffin (DNA from the hypothalamus) back to the body so that it can continue functioning instead of burning up with fever. The hapless man also takes up new leadership in the brain, having a paradigm shift after coming so close to death and begins to live more healthily, demoting William Shatner’s mayor character to poopsmith.
I think that part of the reason it was so poorly received was because the target audience couldn’t really be firmly established. On one hand it tries to be a serious movie, with the live action scenes showing just how nauseating Bill Murray’s character is and how his unhealthiness interferes in his relationships with everyone, especially his daughter. But on the other hand, the cartoony world of his insides draws us into the surreal workings of the human body and how it really goes down at the microscopic level, which insults the adult brain but completely goes over the heads of younger viewers who haven’t taken basic anatomy yet. But the humor can be so juvenile sometimes, you’d think that it was aimed towards that kind of middle school age group because let’s face it, the only people who consider body function humor as hilarious are those kinds of kids…you know the ones. I must admit though, the animation is pretty smooth and well done, showing us a fantastic view of how the Magic School Bus could’ve got stuck in traffic in the bustling, city of Bill Murray’s insides. The story is your run-of-the-mill buddy cop movie with the fate of an entire city resting in two different-as-night-and-day characters who are misunderstood by their peers with an (ironically) chilling villain, but like house buying, the key is location, location, location. With the characters relegated to sentient cells and other critters invisible to the naked eye, it brings a new dimension to cliché characters and which, oddly enough makes the animated characters much more interesting than the character portrayals outside the body. The acting for the live-action parts is subpar at best and horrendous at most; it’s understandable for the “main character” because the movie’s really trying to nail down the message that unhealthy eating habits and mindsets really does wreck your life, but the other characters don’t really help him along much except his smart kid.
Overall, great film for their blending of animation and live-action, but don’t expect greatness on the live-action parts and expect some juvenile humor…lots of juvenile humor.
Can you imagine if your insides consisted of that^ looking like this:
