Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip is, mercifully, the last of the Chipmunks quadrilogy and stars Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Jason Lee, Tony Hale, Josh Green, and Kimberly Williams-Paisley. Note that David Cross escaped this franchise after three movies.
As with Chipwrecked, this is basically a cartoon episode plot or three stitched together. Dave (Lee) has been dating Samantha (Williams-Paisley) and things are getting serious, so Dave is taking her to Miami for the...I don't know, some kind of party involving a pop star (Bella Thorne) that he's producing. He leaves the Chipmunks (Long, Gubler, McCartney) in the care of Samantha's sadistic son Miles (Green), but the four of them find an engagement ring and decide that if they steal the ring, no engagement can take place!
I want to pause here and note that in Bender's Big Score, the first of the four Futurama DVD movies, Fry attempts to stop Leela from getting married by swapping out the pen they intend to use to sign the marriage license with one with no ink. This is played as what it is: An idiotic plan that will obviously not work. Here, the very similar plan is played as something that will work. Mostly I just wanted to think about Futurama for a minute rather than this bullshit.
OK, anyway. The kids try to fly but wind up downing the plane (like, it lands, it doesn't crash), and they run afoul of evil Air Marshal Suggs (Hale) who puts them on a no-fly list and then chases them across the country to...put them in animal jail? It's not clear. Anyway, this isn't the titular "road chip" anyway.
They don't even get to Miami. They get as far as New Orleans when they wind up on social media, Dave and Samantha come to find them, and then they wind up on the road trip back to Miami and then there's some last minute "oh, wait, we stole the ring but we now want them to marry but lol they weren't even going to get married Dave was just holding the ring for someone else!"
This movie feels, for all the world, like a straight-to-DVD release. It's not. It got a theatrical release in December 2015 and finished its opening weekend second in the box office behind The Force Awakens, because the studio really decided to go head-to-head with Star Wars. It was also nominated for three Razzies and won one, but it won for poor Kaley Cuoco for Worst Supporting Actress taking over for Amy Poehler as Eleanor (oh, right, the Chipettes are also (barely) in this movie), which doesn't make any sense because she's hardly in it.
Look, none of these movies were good. They're interesting in a "look what kind of shit used to get made" kind of way - nowadays this kind of movie would go straight to streaming. Of the four, I think the third one is the "best", and this one might be the "worst", and all of them are better than Larry fart Cable Fart: Fart Infartor, so that bar manages to remain where it was.
In conclusion, I do not understand the appeal of the Chipmunks, and these movies aren't even interesting enough to be annoying. They're just cutely bland.
My Grade: F
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT
Rewatch Value: IINSIAIFWT
Next up: The Road Warrior
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