It's a mess, and only a vaguely different sort than the Farrellys are used to making; they keep the jizz inside. Save for two scenes in which Frank literally explodes all over his daughter's teacher, Mrs. Boyd (irritant Molly Shannon, channeling every character she ever played on Saturday Night Live), the bodily fluids are seen only during the animated sequences. But this is a family film, rated PG, meaning the brothers had to excise a sperm-workout scene inside a testicular hangout called Gonad's Gym. There's no accounting for taste, perhaps, when your leading man is willing to swallow anything.
But Osmosis Jones, which jarringly cuts back and forth between the real world and Frank's animated interior, is too obvious and disjointed to satisfy even Frank's cravings; it's junk food, empty calories dolled up as a main course. The scenes that take place in the real world are just tepid setups for the goings-on inside Frank's pale, bloated body, and those set inside Frank (animated by Tom Sito and Piet Kroon, rookies who show their awkwardness) slide by on sight gags that become tiresome in their repetition. It's funny and even a little stunning the first time you see how fetid Frank's infrastructure has become -- in the so-called City of Frank, there are signs everywhere, proclaiming such things as "Danger! Open Cavity!" -- but there are only so many ways to turn organs into cellular nightspots and government buildings before the settings all begin to look the same.
By the time our tour of Frank's innards lands us in the Zit, a throbbing club in which an animated Kid Rock performs (as Kidney Rock, har har), you can't help but feel the excursion has reached its inevitable dead end. Osmosis Jones treads clumsily upon that line separating clever and stupid: For every random line that passes as a joke ("Me and my girlfriend are going down to the kidneys to see the Stones," one cell says to another. "Yeah, they could pass any day now"), there are a dozen more that turn into allergens. ("Where does one go for a lawyer? Why, the hemorrhoids, butt of course.") You won't laugh, but you may very well sneeze at the whole affair. And after the vacuous dazzle of Shrek and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the animation here is positively retro.
That Osmosis Jones plays like a sloppy hodgepodge is no surprise: The live-action scenes were done by the Farrellys, the animation by Sito and Kroon (whose names sounds like bodily functions), and the script was penned by another first-timer, Marc Hyman (whose name is a body part, or maybe something you do to a body part if you're a novice). Nobody seems to be on the same page: The live-action scenes drag like Frank's fleshy belly, which he fills with candy, peanuts, and beer, while the animated sequences work overtime to compensate for the slack pacing. The tone varies wildly: The Farrellys keep things dim and mawkish, referring repeatedly to a dead wife (she OD'd on hamburgers, or so it's suggested) and a live daughter (Elena Franklin) who might as well be embalmed, while the animated scenes skitter with ADD pacing. It's two movies in one that add up to half; just when things get going in the stomach, which is dressed up like an airport ("Unannounced oyster now arriving at Gate Four!" shouts the intercom), we're yanked out like an ingrown hair and thrust back into the banal everyday.
Rock and Hyde Pierce do little more than play variations on their familiar personas: Rock prattles on, gamely trying to milk blood from a gallstone, while the Frasier costar looks on with indifference and disdain. It's 48 Hrs. starring a twelve-hour time-release cold capsule. William Shatner blusters his way through the role of Mayor Phlegmming (he hasn't done this much acting since Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), and Brandy plays his assistant, Leah, the love interest who isn't terribly interesting (oddly, at one point, Rock actually refers to Leah as "Brandy," suggesting a modicum of ad-libbing in a script bereft of much charm).
Lost in all the pea-soup vomit and lemon-yellow mucus is Murray, who's left for dead in a scene that kills whatever momentum the film can muster. He seems to have little interest or life in him; Frank's lethargy is contagious, infecting the film like a deadly virus. He does more damage than Fishburne's dreadlocked Thrax, whose touch is lethal and whose looks are eerily Darth Maul. So if you feel the need to see Osmosis Jones, it'd be wise to get your shots.
