The Onion
January 29, 2003
By Tasha Robinson

There are plenty of good, serious reasons to hate Dreamworks' new animated adventure Sinbad: It makes hash of the original Sinbad stories, de-ethnicizes the once-Arabic characters, and moves the action to a white-bread version of ancient Greece. It bastardizes and blends half a dozen unrelated legends, and it centers alternately on an unconvincing love triangle and a bafflingly inconsistent magical McGuffin. Nothing about the film can be taken seriously, but there's no reason it should be, nor any indication that it wants to be. Sinbad rides a breathless surge of relentless action from its opening scenes, as the goddess of chaos (Michelle Pfeiffer) meddles in a conflict between the pirate Sinbad (Brad Pitt) and a prince (Joseph Fiennes) who was once his best friend. Pitt is out to steal and ransom a glowing occult dealie called "The Book of Peace", but Fiennes, tasked with delivering the book safely to Syracuse, stands in his way. A great deal of swash is buckled, but the battle ultimately ends peacefully, so Pfeiffer just steals the book herself. (Oddly, the book's sole purpose is to ward off evil, but the evil Pfeiffer nabs it with ease. It apparently just defends Syracuse from portentous weather and threatening background music.) A few plot twists later, Pitt is off to Tartarus to reclaim the book, alongside his baffled-but-loyal crew and Fiennes' plucky fiancée (Catherine Zeta-Jones). The events that follow purée the Arabian Nights, Jason's quest for the golden fleece, the voyage of Odysseus, and some special-effects-intensive revisionism into a homogenous stew, but they do so in the service of a lively ride. Video-game producer Patrick Gilmore and Antz director Tim Johnson co-direct a script by John Logan (Gladiator, Star Trek: Nemesis), and they almost never let the pace slacken. At one point, after the characters share a brief contemplative moment, a bored Pfeiffer intervenes, grumbling, "Enough talking. Time for some screaming," and the film fully embraces that philosophy. As Sinbad whirls through a plethora of dazzling setpieces, its super-skilled characters make Errol Flynn look like a fumbling klutz, and its lush, angular animation continues to give Disney a run for its money. Which is why it's a bit sad that Dreamworks still clings to Disney's design style and rote comedy-action-romance format, mostly varying the pattern with off-color humor and some latent but bracing homoeroticism. (As with Dreamworks' The Road To El Dorado, the complicated chemistry between the two male leads is far more dynamic and interesting than the vague, obligatory love story.) Given the talent on display in Sinbad, and the winning brio it dredges out of questionable material, it's easy to wonder what Dreamworks' animation department could accomplish if it stopped following Disney's lead and started forging new paths of its own.

—Tasha Robinson