Review of Osmosis Jones (2001) by Eric S — 07 Jun 2018

Osmosis Jones is actually a decent and underrated movie. It's just the live-action portions of the movie that tend to ruin the experience. The animated scenes are really enjoyable. The animation is gorgeous, the voice acting is good and there's tons of creativity.

For a movie set inside a man's body, the world-building is really impressive. Stuff like the brain being a cinema, armpits being saunas for gangster germs and zits being nightclubs that are probably going to always be temporary are ideas that sound so simplistic yet so creative.

And Thrax, my God, is that villain scary. Then there's the live-action scenes. I'd give this movie a higher rating but the live-action scenes ruined it for me. The Farrelly brothers' type of humour feels really out-of-place here and it's not very funny.

In fact, the live-action scenes seem to be added in as an afterthought. It constantly shoves the message of "eat healthy" in your face. I'd have preferred it if the movie was just the animated scenes and the live-action stuff only appears when it overlaps with the animated stuff or when the live-action scenes are actually crucial to the plot.

Have I mentioned that this movie seems unable to decide who its target audience is? The live-action scenes seem to be targeted towards children due to their use of gross-out humour while the animated scenes seem to have older kids and teenagers in mind due to some of the radar-dodging jokes.

To its credit, some of the puns are actually really clever. It should be noted that this movie was going to be rated PG-13 initially so that factor was what probably led to this movie bombing at the box office.

As an animated movie, Osmosis Jones is a decent, underrated flick that has a stunning amount of creativity but as a live-action film, it's bad.