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Technically Sophisticated, Entertainingly Dull This movie has two things going for it, and that is it. Technically this movie is wonderful. The graphics are incredible. The movie also boasts a cast with more star power than most movies get these days. With these two things going for the movie, it has to be good, right? Wrong. The story centers around Oscar (Will Smith), who is a predictable character we have seen since movies began, though this type of character has faded from popularity. Oscar is always out for the get-rich-quick scheme. He fails to realize that to get ahead in the world requires hard work. After his most recent disaster he finds himself in an encounter with Lenny (Jack Black) and Frankie (Michael Imperioli), an encounter in which Frankie accidentally kills himself. Through a bizarre coincidence, everyone on the reef thinks that Oscar killed Frankie. Unfortunately for Oscar, Lenny and Frankie are the sons of Don Lino (Robert De Niro), and Don Lino is not happy with the "Shark Slayer" who he thinks killed his son. There are a number of other important characters in the movie. Renée Zellweger plays Angie, who has loved Oscar for a long time, though Oscar is too caught up in his schemes to notice. Angelina Jolie is Lola, who is initially fascinating, then becomes annoying, and finally I found her grating. I believe some younger children may find her character confusing and then scary. Ziggy Marley and Doug E. Doug play Ernie and Bernie, a couple of Jamaican accented jellyfish, and Martin Scorsese plays Sykes, who works for Don Lino and is Oscar's boss. Further down in the credits are Peter Falk as Don Feinberg and Katie Couric as Katie Current. Unfortunately for the movie, I never established any sort of sympathy for Oscar. He was too much of a schemer and at the end of the movie I felt sorry for Angie rather than happy for Oscar. Uncharacteristic for Will Smith, Oscar had few, if any, truly funny lines. I preferred the characters of Sykes, Angie, Ernie and Bernie over nearly all the other characters. The movie seemed to wallow in its technical sophistication and ignored plot development. Some scenes were merely puzzling. As one example, Don Lino, Lenny and Frankie were in a restaurant and Don Lino asks Lenny to eat a shrimp (David Soren). The shrimp tells Don Lino about his wife and children and the story is supposed to be funny (I think), but instead it is merely pathetic. Later the shrimp and his friends attack Don Lino and the attempt and result are once again puzzling and pathetic, and I failed to see how the scene was either funny or advanced the plot. I admit that the shrimp was incredibly detailed and marvelous technology, but when you scratch your head and wonder why the shrimp was even shown, you continue to get the impression that the point of the movie was showing off technology, not entertainment. Another running gag was the distortion of known brand names. There was "Coral Cola" and "Katie Current" instead of Katie Couric, and dozens of other plays on words. Ha ha. It was humorous for a little while, but we saw the same thing in Warner Brothers cartoons of the 30s and 40s. Being blitzed by the same gag for an hour and a half is not funny. I admit that I was so caught up in the beauty of the graphics that I was rarely bored, but I should have been caught up in the jokes and the plot. Fortunately for me my daughter bought this movie, because I will not add this one to my collection. Children will find much of the movie confusing or boring because many of the things the movie refers to are adult oriented. Adults will miss the point because there is so little plot, and the jokes (I assume that those were jokes) were often not funny. The few times the jokes were funny did not save this movie. Three stars only because the graphics were incredible, but only two stars for the plot and the jokes.