Tuesday looks to be a big day for DVD releases, with films featuring two top African American actors (albeit not in their best roles) as well as a goofy holiday movie starring Vince Vaughn and an animated chimp adventure featuring the voices of Jeff Daniels and Andy Samberg.
There's a tenuous link between two of these new releases: space. In "Meet Dave," Eddie Murphy plays a spaceship in human form, transporting aliens to Earth. And in "Space Chimps," when a probe from Earth gets sucked into a wormhole and deposited on a distant planet, a chimp crew is shot into space to follow the first ship and see what happened.
They invade us; we invade them; you get a couple of watchable movies. "Meet Dave" is rated PG and "Space Chimps is rated G.
"Hancock" stars Will Smith as a superhero who is invulnerable, has super-strength and can fly. He's also a drunk who causes a lot of damage in his crime-fighting endeavors. A public relations effort to rehab his image starts with Hancock going to jail. "Hancock" is rated PG-13 but also is available in unrated one- and two-disc versions.
Finally, there's the PG-rated "Fred Claus," starring Vince Vaughn as the older, overlooked brother of Nicholas "Santa" Claus (played by Paul Giamatti). With Santa under the gun to crank out toys for Christmas and under a threat of shutdown by an efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey), Fred arrives at the North Pole to pitch in. There are sight gags aplenty, including a scene that the kids will like in which Fred is chased by a pack of Salvation Army Santas. There are messages about blood being thicker than eggnog or something, about what family means, etc. When it comes to sibling rivalry, the relationship between Fred and Nick is somewhat like that of the Smothers Brothers – "Mom always liked you best!" – except Tom's brother wasn't a saint.
– Jim Carnes
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