The world may not look different, but it certainly sounds different after you see Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. Concentrating on decoding such high-pitched voices speaking rapidly for an extended period alerts your ears to frequencies they usually note and then put to one side. When you leave the cinema everyday noises temporarily have a different balance: rattles, squeaks and squeals stand out from the usual low-end rumble.
It’s a curious, pleasant sensation, but the film itself rarely provides the same. Alvin and the Chipmunks was an unexpected blockbuster upon its release two years, earning almost $500 million worldwide and enjoying a particularly lucrative half-life on DVD as children came back for multiple viewings of the furry, harmlessly mischievous troika, so while the sequel is to be expected it nonetheless plays as a lightly reworked update of the original picture.
The movie opens in Paris, where a benefit concert before a rabid audience goes wrong when Alvin’s stage antics once again result in an accident, this time hospitalising their guardian Dave (Jason Lee) with the kind of injuries that usually result from a Gallic encounter with Inspector Clouseau. The chipmunks end up back in the United States, with Dave’s slacker cousin Toby (Zachary Levi), who pays perfunctory attendance to them and happily delivers them to high school.
Dave occasionally calls to check up his wards, which means that Lee can literally phone his performance in. He’s a minor presence in the sequel, which lessens it as the My Name is Earl star was well cast as the good hearted parent who nonetheless is infuriated by the chipmunks’ industrious trouble-making. Toby, by contrast, is a negligible presence – his secondary plot romance with one of the chipmunks’ teachers is astonishingly underdeveloped. Levi also has to decide whether he’s going to be a large comic or a wiry one. As it is he’s pudgy, with a prominent double chin, and there’s no in between when it comes to funny men on the screen; you're either rotund or you’re a runt.
School presents various issues for the brothers, several revolving around the fact that they’re all of eight inches tall. Their bond, naturally, is tested, as Alvin joins the school football (gridiron) team and neglects his less confident siblings. They’re also challenged by the Chipettes – voiced by an unrecognisable Amy Poehler, Anna Faris and Christina Applegate – an aspiring chipmunk group who naively fall under the sway of Ian Hawke (David Cross), the svengali who previously controlled Alvin and company’s career.
The Chipettes basically have one song, a chimpmunkified version of Beyonce’s 'Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", and it’s notable that they can only sing, whereas Alvin is a gun guitarist, pre-emptively forcing outdated roles on a young audience. The plot develops as expected and it’s a reminder that it’s a vastly tricky technique to rely on, and maintain, cuteness as a movie’s guiding principle. Predictably, Simon wisecracks, the chipmunks ride miniature toys, and the Chipettes shake it in a manner that would probably not be rated G if a live female cast did it.
Director Betty Thomas, whose career had reached the nadir of 2006’s John Tucker Must Die, does a competent job given that the majority of her cast are added in post-production. Still, there are only a handful of fluid camera moves on offer; for all the energy of the chipmunks, they’re framed in static set-ups. The film is much the same – it’s running frantically on the same spot, just with an artificially high voice to distract you.
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