From the far reaches of the Milky Way Galaxy, It's Retro Nerd Girl with a film review for you.
Today I'll be reviewing the movie Osmosis Jones released in 2001.
Starring:
Laurence Fishburne, Chris Rock, David Hyde Pierce
Directed by:
Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly for the live action
Piet Kroon and Tom Sito for the animation
Genre:
Animation, Action, Adventure
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Rating:
PG
Budget:
$70,000,000 (estimated)
Current IMDb Rating When Reviewed:
6.3
The Synopsis is:
There is a city inside of each and every human, however a Zoo employee by the name of Frank gets infected with a deadly virus and it’s up to a policeman white blood cell, Osmosis Jones, to save the city and Frank’s life.
Just as a warning, I am going to be talking about some pretty gross happenings in this film so if you are queasy about that sort of thing or eating while watching this video, I recommend you proceed with caution.
My research lead me to find that Warner Bros. Animation was having some financial problems in the year 2000. The year prior they spent $70 million on Brad Bird’s critically acclaimed film The Iron Giant (1999) which unfortunately didn’t do well at the box office. It was a battle for the company during the Disney renaissance in the 1990’s as most audiences were extremely loyal to the animated brand. If it wasn’t Disney most people would just wait for animated films to be released on video.
It was a tough time for animation studios with good ideas, but that didn’t stop Warner Bros. Animation from pouring another $70 million dollars in their next feature, with some of the biggest names in Hollywood attached.
The screenplay for Osmosis Jones began as a nightmare of Jeff Rogers, the owner of the Jupiter art bar in Belltown, Seattle, Washington. Somehow the story landed in the hands of Warner Bros. Animation who hired Marc Hyman to write the screenplay. Marc Hyman said that he wanted to create a movie reminiscent of 1980’s and 1990’s buddy cop action flicks, which indeed, that is what this is at its core.
It’s also an introduction to biology and the workings of the immune system as 75% of the main action in the film happens inside of the human body.
This was not the first property to be located inside the human body. Many people are simply unaware of them because many of them were lesser known properties.
There was Once Upon A Time… Life or Micro Patrol, featured in 1987 was a children’s French animated series which tells the story of the human body's systems and defense mechanisms, such as red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets fighting off viruses and bacteria that threaten to attack.
There was a wonderful little science fiction action comedy, Inner Space released in 1987 as well. It’s an old favorite of mine. It featured a secret miniaturization experiment gone wrong when a tiny exploratory ship is injected into a man instead of a rabbit.
There was Body Troopers also known as Chasing The Kidney Stone released in 1996 which was a Norwegian Children's film about a boy who shrinks to a microscopic size in order to travel through his grandfather's body to find a kidney stone where he meets taste buds, vocal cords and blood cells.
Then there was the infamous Futurama Season 3 episode, Parasites Lost aired in 2001, the same year this movie came out. Fry eats an egg-salad sandwich which infects him with 'intelligent worms' that build an intricate civilization inside his body.
It’s a delightful idea that can be spun in several ways and I wouldn’t mind seeing more biologic exploratory films with this kind of theme.
Osmosis Jones, starts off with the live action portion of the story of Frank Detorre (pronounced de-tori) played by Bill Murray. He’s a zookeeper who is a depressed widower and single parent with a very concerned sweet and caring daughter, Shane.
So the scene that usually kills me with laughter is the scene with the egg. This is a total gross out scene that many people hate, but because I am eternally a seven year old kid at heart, it’s hilarious to me.
It seems as if eggs in 2001 were enemy number one because it was the same culprit in that Futurama episode I mentioned earlier.
Frank is having an egg for lunch near a caged chimpanzee who is digging up his butt. Frank is also digging up his butt showing us that the evolution of man is not so very far from their animal counterpart.
As Frank is handling the egg with his filthy hands, adding mayo and heaps of salt, he clearly displays no interest in his well being as Shane tries to encourage her father to make healthier and more sanitary choices.
The chimp steals the egg with the hand, the very hand he was digging in his butt with a few seconds earlier and puts it in his nasty mouth. Frank struggles with the animal and the egg falls on the dirty ground, even rolling in it slightly. Frank proceeds to eat the filthy egg with abandon, observing the 10 second rule. If you are unaware, at some point in time there was a rule that you could eat something that fell on the floor if you picked it up by a certain time. That would have been 5 seconds, but also 8, or 10 seconds depending on the recklessness of the person. It’s completely gross and the perfect way to pick up germs and viruses. And even though the 10 second rule is gross, Frank could have easily gotten plenty of germs and viruses from any of the numerous unclean situations the film sets up prior to the egg falling on the ground.
This hapless decision to go ahead and eat the egg turns into a serious one for Frank because a viciously deadly virus by the name of Thrax hitches a ride on that egg and this is when we get into the animated segment of the film taken inside the body.
At that point, Frank could have brushed his teeth, swished and gargled with mouthwash and he would have made it harder for Thrax to survive. Because Frank is a slob and doesn’t care about his health, he’s none the wiser that he needs to do anything at all.
Thrax is played wonderfully by Laurence Fishburne who I have never seen in a role like this, so deliciously evil and reveling in it with flair. He not only steals the scene with his vocal performance, but the animators really captured a certain style in designing his look with sly yet intimidating movements. He’s fantastic.
Inside Frank we have a wonderful imaginative display of a busy city, as freeways act as veins from which bacteria, nutrients and blood cells can travel to different organs and parts of the body. It’s brilliant and an incredible teaching tool to learn about the functions and different parts of the body. Much of it is a combination of terrible satire, irony and gags too, giving us a little corny and sometimes gross bodily humor. It really tickled me to see how they built this world and tried to incorporate real world function to it with comedy. I thought it was all so very clever and fully realized as a brand new world for the audience to explore.
One cool aspect of the film is the use of establishment shots and time stamps making the project echo a detective story. I loved that small detail as a framing device to allow our characters feel as if they were investigating a lead to the next beat. I loved it so much.
In the human body, the white blood cells also called leukocytes or leucocytes, are cells of the immune system that are involved in protecting the body against both infectious disease and foreign invaders. This is true of Osmosis Jones, our protagonist, white blood cell cop on the beat. He’s obsessed with protecting Frank almost to a fault. He has a knack for overreacting and causing collateral damage to Frank, which influences the real world. For instance, he once stopped the invasion of a terrible virus from a polluted oyster, by pushing the puke button in the stomach. It’s arguable that he panicked and should have called for backup. However, this caused irreparable damage to Frank’s reputation, resulting in the loss of his cushy job in a pea factory and having to take a zookeeper gig, paying a lot less.
Osmosis is relegated to mouth patrol, where a bunch of germs give chase into the body. Ozzy again creates collateral damage by accidentally damaging a nerve causing a severe leg cramp. These are things that prove that Ozzy has not learned his lesson, which is that he should stop doing things all on his own.
His tropey angry volume challenged middle aged police captain pretty much spells it out for Ozzy and the audience within the first 17 minutes of the movie.
But on the other hand, Ozzy has good instincts. For instance, while most of the people around him see a routine sore throat, Ozzy sees a crime scene. He isn’t taken seriously and that is his battle, for people to see that he isn’t paranoid. When he does ask for help no one believes him. He’s in a catch 22.
Ozzy is played by Chris Rock, who gives him all of the Chris Rock-isms that you would expect from an animated version of Chris Rock. He’s loud and complains all the time, harkening back to Chris’ old stand-up performances, but he’s fun, with a lot of good one liners and corny jokes for the kids. I enjoyed his performance in this a lot and he even makes Ozzy adorable at times.
One cool thing about our action boy, Ozzy, is that he can change his shape in order to get around a lot like real white cells. It’s actually a fun superpower that he gets to use quite often in the film.
To help Ozzy deal with his trust issues, he is forced to work with a 24 hour time release cold pill “with a pleasant fruity flavor”, Drix wonderfully voiced by David Hyde Pierce. Drix is very heroic, and acts as the muscle of the operation, but he also has a heart. I think David has a unique voice in that arena, allowing the character to change tones in moments so we can care about him. Drix starts out sweetly and politely putting up with Ozzy because he needs him to help him get around the city of Frank. However, he grows to see that Ozzy has good instincts and that first and foremost he cares about Frank.
Drix is filled with capsules that he shoots in order to temporarily relieve certain areas. This is the same as the beads found in real cold capsules. That is so stinking cute!
The film also makes a note to mention that the cold capsule does not cure Frank of his ills, but only deals with symptoms on the surface level. As well, even though Drix helps Frank’s body temporarily, Frank will eventually develop an immunity to the cold pill.
Ozzy and Drix are great together from the start acting off each other's differences. It’s the classic straight guy reacting to the ridiculous actions of the comedian. The comedy is within the contrast between the two characters, perfect for a buddy cop flick. It also comes complete with a female love interest for the hero cop to kiss at the end of the film. Marc Hyman nailed it!
Now let’s talk about our villain, Thrax. It’s not clear what virus he is, but he is referred to as the Red Death, which is not the name of any known virus at the moment. By the name Thrax many people assumed he was anthrax, but anthrax is not a virus. He makes it known that he isn’t Ebola, which he claims is a case of dandruff compared to him. He has many of the same characteristics of many deadly viruses though, disguising himself as a flu or cold while doing more dangerous damage to the internal organs. Again, it’s in line with the way real viruses behave.
Now here is where Thrax leaves generic villain ville and takes the bus to awesome ville when we realize why Thrax’s doing what he’s doing. He’s ambitious. He doesn’t want to be a forgotten virus. He wants to break into the record books by killing Frank in 48 hours. His goal is to break into the hypothalamus, steal a “DNA bead” from the gland, which in turn, throws off Frank’s temperature, making it so hot, Frank will die.
And this is not his first time at the rodeo. He’s already killed a young girl who didn’t like to wash her hands, and two adults. He’s been diabolically collecting the DNA beads as a badge and it looks like he’s killed about twenty humans already. He also violently kills a few cells in the body to show the audience that the stakes are serious, ramping up the tension. The deaths in the tale are truly horrific, making him a psychopath, but it is very consistent with the way viruses destroy cells while spreading their infection.
Even though Scarlet fever was considered as Thrax's identity being the closest to be described as the Red Death, it was outright disregarded because one of the symptoms is the appearance of small red dots on the victim’s skin. However, there are some theories that Thrax may be an altered strain of Scarlet fever possibly developed as a biological weapon.
Another unique feature of the story is how the city of Frank is not just a backdrop for Ozzy and Drix’s adventure. The mayor, Mayor Phlemming, played hilariously by William Shatner is a charismatic politician who wants to keep his office during the time of an election. He may be making the wrong choices, but he is very sincere in the fact that he truly believes he’s doing what’s right for Frank. If there is a problem, he thinks that making Frank fatter to expand the body will serve the needs of the city. His big plan is to get Frank to a Chicken Wing Festival in Buffalo, New York to help with the expansion. A fun fact is that the festival was created for the movie, but Buffalo made it a real event held annually on Labor Day weekend since 2002.
Also running for mayor is Tom Colonic, “a regular guy”, who wants to run Frank with attention to eating bran and salads to get the bowels cleaned up. It’s just the cutest comedy reference. By the way, the voice of Tom is Ron Howard’s. Tom observes that there has been a noticeable decline in the condition of the city over the years.
Even with the complaints and warnings that the Mayor should inspire Frank to take care of himself, the Mayor calls them lies. He and a few others that benefit from Franks ills think that they should “stay the course” and resist change. The election is guiding the Mayor's actions, serving what he thinks is the popular vote. According to filmmakers, Mayor Phlegmming is based on Richard Nixon and Tom Colonic is based on John F. Kennedy.
It’s so funny because when Ozzy tells Mayor Phlegmming about Thrax, he says, “now we don’t want to cause a panic.” Have you heard that before? He doesn't want to acknowledge anything negative or contrary to his plans. He thinks that if he keeps most of the population happy and positive he can be re-elected. This criminal investigation becomes political when Mayor Phlegmming removes Ozzy and Drix from the police force and ignores any and all talks about danger. It would be so easy to say “hey, let's increase patrol” or say, “we’ll keep this quiet but do what you can to stop this guy.” Instead, he chooses to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist and the baddie gets to do whatever he wants without resistance, thus making the problem far worse.
It’s a sad vision we see of the Mayor alone in his office as Frank burns up with a fever. It's pretty much Armageddon in Frank’s body as there is a reference to Titanic, where a group of musicians play while the city is falling apart. There is a possibility that he’s regretful, but there is the sense that he’s sad that his plans didn’t work.
The whole film gives me strong year 2020 vibes.
A cute moment in the film was when Ozzy went to the theater that featured Frank’s recurring dreams and nightmares. This harkens back to the film’s origins with Jeff Rogers’ dream.
The animation segments were directed by Piet Kroon and Tom Sito where you can see so much time and thought was put into every inch of the world within Frank. Bobby and Peter Farrelly directed the live action portion to depict the real world of Frank. Even though I think the two segments work well together and off each other, there were a lot of complaints about the live action portion.
One complaint was about the gross out humor, which is a specific niche of humor, either you like or hate. As I mentioned before, I don’t mind it.
The live action human characters in the film are all played as caricatures for the benefit of a cheap laugh and slapstick comedy. It’s way over the top. There are so many scenes that had me in stitches laughing enjoying the silliness of it. It’s downright unbelievable what these people do and I think that was the point. It’s so ridiculous!
A Lot of the scenes were improvised which lent to the stir crazy effect. However, that backfired in a way because the segment wasn’t thought out as brilliantly as the animation portion and they rushed through filming everything in two weeks.
The cinematic quality of the live action portion was also quite poor. I am not sure if it was an artistic choice or if it was a production issue, but I think that has a subliminal effect on how it was received by the audience.
There was a rush to put this thing together after being in production for too long.
The other complaint from reviewers is how much people disliked the character of Frank, who was a filthy and lazy slob. That’s a shame because I actually enjoyed Frank and the way Bill Murray played him, but I think that Frank was sadly underwritten.
He really needed an opportunity for the audience to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing… why he’s too stubborn or lazy to change for his daughter. Doesn’t he love her enough to be the parent she needs?
We all know someone like this, who in spite of the urgings from their loved ones, will not change their ways. They won’t get therapy, stop overdoing bad foods, or start exercising, stop drinking, stop smoking, gambling, or doing drugs. The issues of why they do what they do, are far deeper and I think that is one of the missing pieces here.
Imagine that Frank didn’t want to change because he was still grieving his wife’s passing. Maybe he’s afraid to fall in love again and possibly lose love again. There are a few scenes where you can see that Frank is still wearing his wedding ring so this could possibly be true, but the film doesn’t directly imply this. It’s something that is built into the story, but it is never tapped into.
Most of all you feel compassion for Shane. She is pretty much raising herself and her father. I was happy that by the end that we had a happier resolution for her.
But let me just linger on Shane for a minute because a movie that is most often compared to this one, unfairly I might add, is Inside Out release in 2015, some 14 years later. It was critically hailed for detailing the inner workings of the mind in a similar fashion Osmosis Jones details the functions of the body. There are several big differences between the films, but one thing in particular that this film almost did, but didn’t quite pull off, was the emotional chord.
There is a scene where Shane cries profusely over the lifeless body of her father and it was supposed to make the audience cry to… or at least feel some intense emotions. It doesn’t quite work. You do feel sorry for Shane, but not that much for Frank, who pretty much stubbornly caused his situation.
In Inside Out, I cried like a baby at least 2 times and the more I see the film, the more deeply I cry. That emotional chord is what takes a good story to the next level. That is what was missing from Osmosis Jones.
Chris Elliot hilariously played Uncle Bob along Molly Shannon who played Mrs. Boyd, giving us some more improvised comedy in the film. One of my favorite scenes in the film is with Molly Shannon and Bill Murray. She does something in that scene that you can see that Bill is struggling not to lose it before they cut away. It’s so funny.
Not every joke is funny or even politically correct, so beware of some offensive material which horribly dates the film. However, one dated element that I found very enjoyable was the soundtrack which was a groovy mix of millennium R&B and rap. Surprisingly there were about 16 songs and a whole bunch of them played during the credits, which makes me wonder if they were supposed to play during the body of the film. I may or may not be correct because there were many scenes edited out of the film to get it’s rating.
The film was critically panned and underperformed at the Box Office. However, it became successful on home video and grew quite a following. Eventually an adorable animated Saturday morning TV show on WB, Ozzy & Drix aired from 2002–2004. A mosquito transfers Ozzy and Drix out of Frank and into a young boy, focusing on the friendship and action adventure in this new body.
As someone fascinated by the inner workings of the human body, Osmosis Jones is right up my alley. I had so much fun with this movie. If you can get past the gross out humor, this is a pretty good buddy cop movie with an awesome villain that chews up the scenery.
My Rating:
8.8
That sums up my review. I hope you liked it. This is Retro Nerd Girl signing off!
Take care movie lovers! I'm off to the next review!
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