One of the Most Intelligent Movies I've Ever Seen

 

Freddie as F.R.O.7

1992

D: Jon Acevski

**********

Pros: Decent animation, Some stylish moments

Cons: Insane plot, Unlikable protagonist

    
     Normally, one does not want to ghost spoilers for a sub-par story, but I urge anyone who reads this to experience this movie by watching it before reading this review in full.  This movie is an experience.  No one can be told what Freddie as F.R.O.7 is.  You have to see it for yourself.  It is a movie that defies human logic.  There are no words to describe this film.  A friend on Skype who helped introduce it to me said that the Wikipedia synopsis reads like it’s been vandalized.  I assure you, it’s an accurate description.  Apparently, the director conceived this as a story for his children, and if Lady in the Water is anything to go by, that’s not a good sign. However, while that movie seemed to have a good premise ruined by the creator’s ego, F.R.O.7 is just pure absurdity.    

     The movie begins in the present, where our hero Freddie (Ben Kingsley) is driving his anthropomorphic car through the suspiciously deserted streets of Paris.  He enters his apartment and looks at a fish pond, which triggers a flashback of his childhood in Medieval France.  He remembers how his father the king was murdered by his aunt Messina (Billie Whitelaw), who then transformed into a cobra and chased him into the ocean, where he is rescued by the Loch Ness Monster (Phyllis Logan).  This is the only scene where Freddie acts with any appropriate level of fear in the face of danger.  Now an immortal/time traveling(??) frog, he lives happily with other frogs for a while until he spontaneously grows to human size (At this point I’m wondering why this film has a title like a bad 90’s cyberpunk movie).  Here we see a recurring theme with this character: his utter lack of awareness or concern for the gravity of any situation.  He should be frightened by this change and the prospect of having to live with humans as a 6’ bipedal frog, but he seems unaffected by it.  The other frogs then produce some clothes that they had for some reason and send him on his way (Why do I feel like I’m describing a dream?).  We then return to present day Paris as Freddie answers a phone call, which sets the main plot into action.  If you’re thinking that framing the establishing flashback in this Paris scene is unnecessary, then you are clearly unprepared for the insanity that this movie has in store of you.  I was too busy emitting high-pitched laughs of disbelief to concern myself with such criticisms. 

     The crisis at hand is that a mysterious force is making British landmarks disappear, including Buckingham Palace, which is depicted by the animation as an empty shell.  At this point, Brigadier G (Nigel Hawthorne), whose running gag is that he is unable to talk on the phone without tangling himself in the cord, prepares to receive a specialist from the French Secret Service.  At this point I finally figured out that the movie’s title is, in fact, a lame play on 007.  Even worse, the full title is Freddie as F.R.O.7, making it redundant and awkward in addition to being stupid.  After picking up a sexy martial arts expert named Daffers (Jenny Agutter) and a weapons expert named Scotty (John Sessions), he goes to a horse race and finds some enemy agents, who stupidly blab about the enemy’s next target after a laughably failed attempt to subdue him.  Fortunately for world security, he also wins his bet on the horse race.

      Now I must point out a major problem with this movie: Freddie is an asshole.  Upon learning that the next target is Big Ben, he informs the British chain of command that it is Windsor Castle.  Blatantly misleading his superiors so that he and his two partners could use Big Ben as a Trojan Horse and he can play hero.  On top of that he steals the batteries to his partners’ walkie-talkies and talks them out of bringing their guns on this dangerous mission.  Our hero…bucks authority and risks the safety of his allies and the world so he can stroke his ego.    In another scene, when he and Scotty are trapped in an underwater cage by the bad guys, he gives Scotty the “French kiss of life” (while taking too much pleasure in Scotty’s reluctance) and then summons Nessie to rescue them.  Then, he leaves Scotty (possibly the most likable character in the movie) wet and shivering on a rock so he can enjoy a terrible song number courtesy of Nessie and her fellow Loch Ness monsters. 

  

HAVE FUN, SCOTTY!

      Another flaw with the hero is that he has no uncertainty or vulnerability.  Although I said before that I don’t consider the lack of physical vulnerability to be a deal breaker in a movie, you usually need some type of struggle for the hero, even if it’s internal.  Freddie almost never displays any kind of doubt and never seems to understand the gravity of any situation.  I think most people, when confronted by evil aunts who murdered their parents and turned them into frogs, would feel a bit awkward, but Freddie is apparently not most people.  This problem comes to a head in the final fight scene, in which Freddie, Daffers and Scotty easily defeat a squad of bad guys who barely make even the most minimal effort to counter their incredibly slow attacks.  It is one of the most underwhelming action scenes I’ve ever seen, plus terrible music is playing the whole time.

He even stops in the middle of the fight to strike this pose.

It gets worse when Freddie continues to face the gunmen and remembers some advice from his father, who showed him a sword and told him “You don’t need to fear this.”  You know, that’s actually a good lesson.  Weapons are no more good or evil than the person holding them, and it would be irrational to fear…oh wait, Freddie then uses magical powers to turn the mooks’ guns into butterflies.  So his father meant, “You don’t need to fear people pointing guns at you because you can just use your magic to turn those guns into butterflies.”  Well…that’s a good lesson too, I guess.

      Now that I’ve described the heroes, let’s take a look at the villains.  In the movie’s main plot, Messina runs a snake-themed terrorist organization with a fatman named El Supremo (Brian Blessed), who has a freakishly triangular chin.  He’s one of the most ironically charming bad villains I’ve seen.  Then again, it’s hard not to like something voiced by Brian Blessed.  It’s implied that he and Messina are lovers of some kind, even though Messina spends most of her time as a cobra.  Since Chin the Fat has a snake fetish, you’d think she’d turn him into a snake too, but oh well. 

Love knows no form.

They hatch what is probably one of the most absurd evil plans I have ever seen.  They send a flying snake craft to capture British landmarks and then shrink them with a shrink way.  Then it gets really stupid.  Upon capturing these buildings, they use a magic crystal to drain their, uh…historical life force, which causes all the Britons to lapse into a deep sleep, allowing them to invade the country with an absurdly large fleet of Typhoon-class submarines (of which there are only seven in real life).  I am not just typing random things to be funny.  This actually what happens in the movie.  So the message is that British people are psychologically dependent on their historical  landmarks because they’re just that shallow.  This is a British film, and I thought America had low self-esteem.

I'm sure the ghost of Shakespeare was happy to be involved with this film.

And then there’s the villain song.  Oh dear crap, the villain song.  It’s not that good a song, and it has some classically forced rhyming, but it’s the visuals that really grab one’s attention.  It consists of Messina dancing and singing with a microphone in her coils about how she’s the Queen of Evilmania while an army of roller-skating pseudo-Nazis, black knights and freaking Klansmen dance in the background.  Oh, and even though snakes have long been associated with sensuality anyway, they gave her hips to swing.  What’s even odder, her hips aren’t even good hips, they’re like starving person hips: really jagged bony protrusions with skin on them.  At least I fixed that problem when I made my own art of her:

      There are other distracting moments in this movie as well.  One is Freddie’s car, Nicole.  Though she cannot talk, she is anthropomorphic enough to have a crush on Freddie and gets jealous when Daffers is around.  She hops over other cars and makes annoying froggy sounds while trailing hearts.  At one point, Freddie uses her to jump square on top of an elderly couple in a convertible, (because he’s an asshole).  The reason why Nicole is anthropomorphic is never explained, and she disappears without mention halfway through the movie.  There’s also a random scene where a gang of crows comments on the disappearing landmarks and then a leatherdaddy crow and his friend show up to annoy Brigadier G about it.  They also pop up in the final scene for no reason.  An evil double agent (Jonathan Pryce) informs his confederates that Freddie was going to the horse race (if they had done the smart thing and avoided the race, we might not have a movie), but other after that his arc goes nowhere.  Also, as if bestiality from the bad guys wasn’t concerning enough, they ship Freddie and Daffers (in fact, Daffers flashes Freddie the first time they meet for no apparent reason).  I was fully expecting Freddie to get turned back into a human upon defeating his aunt, but that doesn’t happen.  Not that that stops them or anything.      

I think Scotty got closer than that, actually.

     So as you might imagine, it’s a pretty bad movie, though I wouldn’t say it’s the worst animated movie of all time (I’ve seen Foodfight! and Tentacolino).  I can’t really hate it, even though it’s objectively worse that a lot of animated films I do.  In fact, it’s arguably so bad it’s good.  It’s a little disappointing that this movie sunk the studio.  It was implied that the sequel was going to take place in America, and I would have loved to see that.  I also find it funny how many respected English actors they got to be in this movie (The American version has an intro read by James Earl Jones).  In addition to ironic appeal, I genuinely like some things in this film.  The animation is decent, and it even has some stylish moments and nice details (like the presence of some well-rendered Panavia Tornadoes).  There are some moment of bad lip syncing, like when a villain laughs but her lips aren't moving or smiling.  I admit I do kind of like Messina because I’ve always loved cartoon snakes.  I also think Nessie is cute because, in case you haven’t noticed, I have a thing for fat dragons, and she’s close enough

PS: I almost can’t even believe I wrote this review.  It reads like something I just made up for laughs.

PPS: I love TVTropes’ Crowning Moment of Awesome page for this movie.
PPPS: Oh, I just found out: Grace Jones was Messina's singing voice during her song.