FLUSHED AWAY

By Christopher Rice

As Roddy the mouse sleeps peacefully in his owner’s mansion, a sudden explosion of water spits up through the drains revealing Sid, a sewer rat who reflects the average male in today’s world. Sid takes over the joint, turns the television to the World Cup. Roddy has enough, and attempts to outsmart Sid by insisting he gets into the swirling ‘Jacuzzi’ before the game. Sid suddenly shoves Roddy into the toilet and Roddy is Flushed Away to the underground sewers.

As Roddy swirls down the drains toward the sewer, he hits corner after corner in an old-fashioned kind of comic humor, catches an orange fish who asks,
“Have you seen my dad?” and finally falls into a river of sewer water where he encounters sewer slugs. Originally the slugs only had the bit part during Roddy’s intro to the sewer but because of their popularity and laugh-out-loud visual and audible humor, the slugs appear again and again through out the movie.

The movie is outrageously exciting for the kids and hilariously relevant to today’s world for the adults. The adventure follows two little mice, Rita and Roddy, voiced by Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet, as they make a ‘spit-n-handshake’ deal to take on the impossible and head back “up top” to the surface form the sewers in order to get back to Roddy’s home where he then will set Rita on her way with a real ruby – due to the fact that he broke her treasured glass ruby. The characters’ goals a clear, motivated, and classically short-ended producing an emotional climactic ending as they realize their goals didn’t involve each other. The emotion is light, the humor is layered, and the creative sewer world is unlike anything seen before.

The conflict is high, smart, yet light enough for kids; Toad wants to steal a power cable from Rita, whom uses it as a belt, in order to power the giant door to the sewer line to open during the half time of the World Cup. Why? Because like Sid, everyone always waits to go to the bathroom until half-time, which means if the door is open, the city of rodents will be destroyed by a flood of sewage and Toad, along with his army of infant tadpoles, will rule the under world. It’s a great twist on flash floods from a writer’s point of view because it’s not just a flood of water, it’s a flood of everyone's toilets … anyway – the stakes are high for our two protagonists and the comic relief is around every corner – in the form of slugs.

The movie personifies not only the animals superbly but also the situations and characters involved resulting in a powerful message that wealth and loneliness simply don’t compare to love and family. Whether it is classic movie homage or slap-tick humor this movie has it all.

Overall, this movie is a fantastic ride for kids and adults and surprises audiences over and over with new jokes, old jokes, and everything in between.