Ignoring for a second that a mouse getting flushed down the toilet is just about the most preposterous movie premise of all time, Flushed Away (from the creators of Wallace & Gromit) actually offers up a pretty enjoyable 90 minutes. To be clear, in the pantheon of animated films, Flushed is no Finding Nemo, nor is it even A Bug's Life (though it borrows elements from both). But it's okay, because Flushed is not trying to join the Pixar elite. Because CGI animation is no longer the spectacle it once was, Flushed Away aims only to be average, and fulfills this goal neatly. The plot is cribbed from Toy Story (or any number of kids' movies where things that aren't supposed to talk do): Roddy (Hugh Jackman) is a lonely, snobbish pet rat living in a posh London neighborhood. His life predictably turned upside down when an intruder flushes him down the toilet, Roddy lands in the thriving rat world of the sewers. There, he meets Rita (Kate Winslet). At first Roddy and Rita don't like each other. But somehow, they warm up to each other after some wacky misadventures. Along the way, they steal some loot and try to save their fellow rats from an evil toad. Pretty standard.
Of course, leave it to DreamWorks to take a movie with super-high gross out potential (hello, did we mention a mouse totally gets flushed down the toilet?) and sanitize it into a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy that could star a generically feisty Sandra Bullock and a supposedly straight-laced Keanu Reeves, but instead features two homely rats. Though one can't be sure that this movie wasn't written by chimps, it still contains some funny gags (and meta-gags) and a halfway-decent soundtrack featuring the musical stylings of both a maggot quartet and Tom Jones. Probably, the chimps are already hard at work on the sequel.
