“Get over it” is the tagline for Over the Hedge, and it is good advice for anyone approaching the film expecting a sharp satire of American suburbia. DreamWorks Animation’s 2006 feature, directed by Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick, is a gentler thing than its premise suggests: a con story about a raccoon who tricks a family of woodland animals into raiding a housing development, and then feels bad about it.
The film runs 83 minutes, which is exactly the right length for what it is. It opened in Los Angeles on April 30, 2006, and reached U.S. theaters on May 19 through Paramount Pictures. It is funny, it is warm, and it is almost entirely without teeth.
Trailer, via cineAE.
RJ and Vincent
The setup is the best thing in the film. RJ, voiced by Bruce Willis, tries to steal a stockpile of food from a bear named Vincent, voiced by Nick Nolte. Vincent wakes up, the food is destroyed, and RJ talks his way into a one-week extension to replace it. Vincent threatens to kill him if he fails or runs away.
That is a genuinely mean premise for a family film, and the movie knows it. RJ spends most of the runtime lying to everyone he meets, and the script lets that sit. He is not misunderstood. He is guilty.
Willis plays him with the easy charm of a man who has been talked out of worse. Nolte’s Vincent is a brief, effective slab of menace.
Verne Wakes Up
The family at the center of Over the Hedge is led by Verne, a turtle voiced by Garry Shandling. They wake from hibernation on the first day of spring and find that most of their forest has been turned into a housing development, cut off from what remains by a giant hedge.
Verne is the worry. Shandling’s voice is perfect for it, all flat vowels and grievance. He is right about RJ, and the film makes him pay for being right, which is a more interesting choice than it sounds.
RJ convinces the others to scavenge from the humans. They stockpile food without knowing why he wants it. The animals are oblivious to his arrangement with Vincent, and that gap is where the movie’s guilt lives.
Gladys Hires Dwayne
The human side of Over the Hedge is thinner. Gladys Sharp, voiced by Allison Janney, is the neighborhood homeowner association president. She notices the animal problem and hires an exterminator named Dwayne LaFontant, voiced by Thomas Haden Church.
Dwayne rigs animal traps in Gladys’ yard, including a device called the Depelter Turbo, which the film describes as illegal contraband. That is about as far as the satire goes: the suburbs have rules, the rules have enforcers, and the enforcers have gadgets.
Get over it.
Gladys and Dwayne are functional obstacles, not characters. The movie never asks what they want beyond order. Compared with the animals, they are drawn in one line each.
Hammy and Stella
The raid on Gladys’ house is the film’s set piece, and it belongs to the supporting cast. Hammy, a squirrel voiced by Steve Carell, disables the Depelter Turbo. Stella, a striped skunk voiced by Wanda Sykes, steals the collar of Gladys’ Persian cat, Tiger, which gets the animals inside.
Carell’s Hammy is the movie’s engine. He is fast, he is loud, and he is the only character who seems to be having a good time. Sykes gets less to do than she should, but Stella has a confidence the rest of the group lacks.
William Shatner voices Ozzie, a possum, and Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy play Penny and Lou. Avril Lavigne voices Heather. Omid Djalili plays Tiger. It is a deep bench for a film that mostly asks them to react.
A Debt Repaid
The mechanics of Over the Hedge are clean. RJ has a debt, he recruits help under false pretenses, the help finds out, and the debt gets settled anyway. There is a chase involving a Rottweiler named Nugent. There is a moment where Verne is blamed for destroying the food and shunned by the family after he insults them for listening to RJ.
That shunning is the film’s best scene, because it is the one place where the movie lets the group be wrong. Verne tells them the truth and they punish him for it. RJ watches. Then Verne reconciles with RJ and the others, and RJ convinces everyone to invade Gladys’ home.
The reconciliation arrives fast. Over the Hedge is 83 minutes, and it spends its last act on the raid rather than on the apology. That is a trade, and it costs the film something.
What Over the Hedge Gets Right
The casting history is more interesting than most of the finished film. Bill Murray and Harold Ramis were considered for RJ and Verne. In July 2002, Jim Carrey was announced to co-star as RJ, with Shandling as Verne. Carrey dropped out in October 2004 and Willis replaced him, though some of Carrey’s lines remained. Gene Wilder was offered the role of an owl named Norbert, turned it down, and the character was scrapped.
You can hear the ghost of that other movie in Over the Hedge. Carrey’s RJ would have been a different animal, and Wilder’s owl suggests a stranger, funnier film was once on the table. What got made is smoother and safer.
The film is based on the comic strip by Michael Fry and T. Lewis, and it was written by Len Blum, Lorne Cameron, David Hoselton and Kirkpatrick. It grossed $339.8 million worldwide on an $80 million budget. That is a success by any measure, and it explains why the film plays the way it does. It is built to be liked.
Over the Hedge is a good movie with a great premise it never fully commits to. The RJ-Vincent debt is dark, the suburban raid is bright, and the film splits the difference instead of picking a side. Carell and Shandling carry it. Nolte and Willis give it weight. The humans are furniture.
It is worth watching once, and it will not stay with you. The parts that linger are the ones the movie seems least proud of: Vincent’s threat, Verne’s shunning, RJ’s guilt. Everything else is a hedge, and the film never gets over it.
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