Don’t blame Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake as the voices for the classic Hanna-Barbera characters Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo in the wreck of a movie known as Yogi Bear (opening Dec. 17). The live-action/animated 3D adventure by Warner Bros., an adaptation of the popular television cartoon, is awful from every angle and these two have nothing to do with it. In fact, Timberlake is especially good in recreating the adorable sidekick and Aykroyd, not quite nailing Yogi’s deep baritone and rolling cadence, adds what he can to an anemic characterization. The script feels like it has a hundred hands on it, aimed at tots or younger, with terrible live action casting—especially in the park ranger department—an idiotic plot and almost none of the series’ signatures. Live action Jellystone Park doesn’t look like cartoon Jellystone, for one thing, since this poorly conceived picture was filmed in New Zealand. Yogi Bear is barely in the movie, a lackluster outing built around a lame save-the-park theme with an environmentalist message. They don’t even get that part right; characters talk about saving trees—while standing in a cabin made of dead trees. Directed by a 3D visual effects artist whose credits include big, loud, bloated bombs such as The Island, Hook, and Pearl Harbor, this Yogi Bear has nothing on the affable cartoon character, which Aykroyd fondly recalls in the press notes as warm, happy and a bit of an outlaw. Here, Yogi just seems lost.
