"The Passion of the Chicken"?

January 3, 2007

MOVIE REVIEW 'FOGHORN LEGHORN'
The Passion of the Chicken
By Bumblagong S Scott
“I’m going to pluck off his feathers and make him watch me wear them.” This grisly threat is delivered by one of the main bad guys in Mel Gibson’s “Foghorn Leghorn.” The promised defenestration (and frying) never takes place, but viewers who share this director’s apparently limitless appetite for country fried chicken will not be disappointed, since not much else in the way of poultry threats have been left to the imagination. There are plenty of chicken deaths, chicken dinners, impalings, dumplings, clubbings, buckets o’ chicken and beheadings. Hearts are torn, still beating, from slashed-open Rhode Island Reds and fried up on a hot skillet. A chicken’s face is chewed off by a jaguar. Another’s neck is pierced by darts tipped with frog venom. Most disturbing, perhaps, is the sight of hundreds of chicken carcasses haphazardly layered in an open pit: a provocative and ill-advised excursion into Perdue imagery on this director’s part.
Anti-bird violence has become the central axiom in Mr. Gibson’s practice as a filmmaker, his major theme and also his chief aesthetic interest. The brutality in “Foghorn Leghorn” is so relentless and extreme that it sometimes moves beyond horror into a kind of grotesque comedy, but to dismiss it as excessive or gratuitous would be to underestimate Mr. Gibson’s seriousness. And say what you will about him — about his problem with booze or his problem with Jews — he is a serious filmmaker.
Which is not to say that “Foghorn Leghorn” is a great film, or even that it can be taken quite as seriously as it wants to be. Mr. Gibson’s technical command has never been surer; for most of its 12-hour 18-minute running time, “Foghorn Leghorn,” written by Mr. Gibson and Mel Blanc Jr, is a model of narrative economy, moving nimbly forward and telling its tale with glee, clarity and force. It is, above all, a rambunctuous and kinetic action movie, a drama of rescue and revenge with very little organic relation to its barnyard setting. Yes, the dialogue is in various Leghorn dialects, which will sound at least as strange to American ears as the Latin and Aramaic of “The Passion of the Christ,” but the film’s real language is Hollywood’s, and Mr. Gibson’s, native tongue.
When I first heard about this project, and later when I saw the early trailers, I halfway hoped that Mr. Gibson might turn out to be an American (or half-Australian) version of Daffy Duck, setting out into the countryside to explore the dark and tangled regions of chicken nature. Once you get past the costumes and the subtitles, though, the most striking thing about “Foghorn Leghorn” is how comfortably it sits within the conventions of mainstream moviemaking. It is not an obsessive opera like Daffy’s “Aguirre: The Wrath of Duck,” but rather a pop period epic in the more chickenner mode of Chicken Run or Big Yellow Birdie and as such less interested in agricultural or poultry y authenticity than in imposing an accessible scheme on the humble chicken yard.