Zookeeper: Critic Reviews

It's all very ho-hum, though James, who's like Jason Alexander with a touch of Jeremy Piven, is still a schmo you can't help rooting for.

Coraci doesn't impose much discipline, letting some scenes run wild and others peter out, their punch lines dangling.

It's hard to think of a human finding much to laugh about in this wounded beast.

Casting carries "Zookeeper" over its roughest patches. The vocal guest stars are inspired.

The talking animals are wildly child-pleasing, except that much of their talk concerns matters of animal husbandry. Is there such a thing as a hard PG?

A comedy whose cliche-embracing stupidity borders on the surrealistic.

A children's comedy about talking animals that feels as if it were written by children or, perhaps, by talking animals.

There's little to recommend about Zookeeper, a movie that's flat, lacking in surprises and very dull.

Did we mention that things just go better with Kevin James? Well-trodden comedy hooks become strangely more amusing. Goofball physical shtick elicits broader smiles. The bumblingly stupid is made endearing.

If a worse movie is released this year, I hope I don't have to see it.

Look, a great movie this is not. A pleasant summer entertainment it is.

If you've been waiting for Hollywood to produce a romantic comedy with a supporting cast made up of talking animals . . . well, no, even then, Zookeeper will let you down.

Will most audiences mind this? Probably not. Should they? Of course. They deserve better and frankly, so does Kevin James.

It's stupid, then it veers toward the absurd, but with James at its center it remains sort of sweet throughout. You can't hate James or the movie; both are just sort of dopey but well-meaning.

Ultimately, it's a marketing pitch in search of a movie that proves punishingly flat, with even the slapstick so sparsely delivered as to replicate a long slog through the zoo, surrounded by fidgety kids, on a suffocating summer's day.

This one is strictly for James' hard-core fans and anyone wishing to witness the sole appearance of the once-mighty MGM lion on a new feature this year.

Director Frank Coraci, a veteran of Adam Sandler's comic style, is more at home with the slapstick than the would-be romance or the movie's darker subtext.

Little kids - hence the G rating - and those who think poop-tossing is funny will be amused by Zookeeper. The rest of us are better off not feeding the animals.

Kevin James has developed an irresistible screen persona as a nice-guy/underdog, which has served him well in some pretty mediocre films like Paul Blart: Mall Cop. In that context, Zookeeper is a quantum leap forward...

Unfortunately, nobody had the good sense to call the comedy authorities and shut this Zookeeper down.

James can be a funny guy, but the lack of laugh-worthy material in Zookeeper stretches his comedic abilities past the breaking point.

Beastly comedy for the lowest of brow.

James hurls himself into this sad scenario with energy and teddy-bear charm that makes him impossible to hate. But it's easy to hate "Zookeeper." If we could talk to the animals, they'd probably hate it, too.

It's probably time to stop fretting about Kevin James's movies, and to stop hoping they'll get better.

There's no "The" in the title of the Kevin James comedy "Zookeeper," and that lack of a definitive article pretty well encapsulates the generic fat man follies on display here.