Monstros vs. Aliens

Monsters Vs. Aliens has plenty of lively animation and a handful of solid jokes. It is not of a caliber of most of the Pixar films, but, at times, it comes close.

As I took off my gray-lensed 3-D spectacles at the end of Monsters vs. Aliens, I felt not so much immersed as fuzzy with exhaustion.

MvA isn't, and isn't pretending to be, as ambitious a project as Pixar's almost universally lauded Wall-E was. But does it have to feel like something that's just rolled off a conveyor belt, made according to an exacting but dull set of specifications?

It's an affectionate, fairly funny riff on 1950s sci-fi movies, which often featured aliens, sometimes in the form of gelatinous glop, trying to take over Earth before earthlings, usually of the military variety, save the day.

True, the story doesn't amount to much, but the plot tends to take a back seat when you've got a not-quite-50-foot version of Reese Witherspoon duking it out with a mighty alien robot alongside the Golden Gate Bridge.

As willfully chock-full of the familiar as the animated feature is, it's also a hoot.

Heavily touted as an industry breakthrough for 3-D, DreamWorks Animation's clunky and wildly unimaginative Monsters vs. Aliens really doesn't have a clue what to do with the technique.

It looks good, has some talented people behind the mic, and is visually engaging, but there's nothing memorable about the script at all. The 3D may pop, but the story is flat.

"Nice" is the adjective that seems to surface most in trying to pin down the film's most salient quality, which means that while the film is enjoyable enough, it is unlikely to become a classic for us, or a Shrek sort of franchise for DreamWorks.

The super-duper-3-D-big-screen-Imax-deluxe extravaganza that is Monsters vs. Aliens has bells and whistles, superb technical sophistication and dazzling visual effects, sound, fury and Reese Witherspoon. What it doesn't have is heart.

Thanks to some splendid vocal work by its all-star cast and some truly marvelous 3-D effects this family epic is a definite good time, kids and adults alike sure to find plenty to enjoy and little to be disappointed about.

Three-dimensional sequences, whether animated or live action, can feel more gimmicky than integral to the tale. Happily, such is not the case with the entertaining Monsters vs. Aliens.

At the altar... Susan sprouts to just under 50 feet tall, taking out the church roof and steeple in the process. Next time, raise higher the roof beam, carpenters.

Directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon push so hard for three-dimensionality that they basically have their animators putting sightlines before storylines.

The cool stuff -- like 3-D and collapsing bridges -- may get filmmakers halfway there, but to make it all the way home, they need the usual movie elements, like a good story and vivid characters, and here Monsters vs. Aliens comes up short.

A big, silly spoof of an animated film, fast and funny and visually dazzling.

A highly competent, smartly engineered delivery system for the very clichés it pretends to subvert.

The DreamWorkers can be satisfied with having produced another crowd-pleasing, expert-babysitting vaudeville turn.

An animated funhouse that delivers on its title and ups its scary-comic impact if you see it in 3-D.