Alviiiiin! Your movie stinks
"Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip" would be best described as kiddie film fast-food contaminated with intellectual botulism and narrative salmonella.
The first big laugh (at least at a Saturday morning screening loaded with kids who sat passively in their seats for most of the time) occurred when Theodore urinates on the floor at the airport.
Then, he follows that by dropping what appears to be an unshelled M&M candy on the floor. But it isn't.
The movie encourages us to make fun of kids because they're smart. (In one scene, poor Simon gets pilloried for being good at percentages.)
Then, the chipmunks make it look like fun to ride a skateboard down a large slide into a swimming pool. (Maybe other kids might try that!)
If you've gotten this far into the review and still think "The Road Chip" sounds like kid-friendly fun, consider that the villain is a federal air marshal who wants to stuff the Chipmunks like trophies. (So much for teaching youngsters to trust authorities placed on airplanes to protect them.)
The Chipmunks' human manager Dave Seville (reprised by Jason Lee) is a terrible father figure, always absent and seldom communicating anything but edicts and consequences to his three misbehaving furry "kids."
Dave's third-act adoption of the Chipmunks desperately shoves a meaningful, emotive message into "The Road Chip." But it feels forced, fractured, feckless and false.
The only thing "The Road Chip" accomplishes is making three previous "Chipmunk" comedies look not as abysmally bad by comparison.
Still with me?
"The Road Chip" begins with Alvin (Justin Long), Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler) and Theodore (Jesse McCartney) worried sick that Dave is going to pop the question to his new main squeeze Samantha (Northwestern University theater grad Kimberly Williams-Paisley), then immediately abandon them.
So, the L.A. trio has three days to get to Miami to stop Dave from proposing.
They get help from Miles (Josh Green), Samantha's teenage son, a mischievous malcontent with abandonment issues caused by the deadbeat dad he barely knew.
At the L.A. Airport, the quartet runs across the Cruella de Vil of air marshals, Benson ("Veep" regular Tony Hale, who deserves recognition for setting the bar of cartoonish overacting so high that Roger Rabbit would make a plausible Hamlet).
"I am the police of the sky!" he screeches. He pursues the Chipmunks everywhere with an obsession usually reserved for great white whales.
With musical numbers and lots of lowbrow comedy, "The Road Chip" will not bore its target audience, although director Walt Becker (best known for his 2002 Ryan Reynolds college comedy "National Lampoon's Van Wilder") doesn't appear to know what his target audience is, as evidenced by his use of musical themes from adult movies "Psycho" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly."
Meanwhile, Miles lets loose with a champion burp and Theodore detonates some nasty flatulence.
"Pizza toots!" he shouts.
Yep, that fast food will get you in the end.
“Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip”
Half star
Starring: Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Jason Lee, Kimberly Williams-Paisley
Directed by: Walter Becker
Other: A 20th Century Fox release. Rated G. 86 minutes