The Ant Bully
Director: John A. Davis
Actors: Meryl Streep, Nicholas Cage
Release Date: Monday 30th November -0001
Genre(s): Family
Running time: 90 minutes
Didn't we already do ants? Didn't A Bugs Life and Antz already cover the spectrum of cute insect stories? No, as it turns out. Not when The Ant Bully has a very important message of racial equality to get across to today's kids, especially in today's war-mongering climate. 10-year-old Lucas Nickle (Zach Tyler Eisen) is constantly picked on by the bullies who live in his street and Lucas takes out his frustration on the ant colony that inhabit his front lawn. The stomping of his feet and squirting of the garden hose may look pretty harmless if you're a human but even a small drop of water can decimate a whole colony. But this colony is more than "just a bunch of stupid ants" and they've had enough. To finally put a stop to the senseless attacks, wizard ant Zoc (Cage) concocts a potion that will shrink the human down to ant size. The colony puts the plan into action, minimizes Lucas and takes him back to the anthill. Now Lucas is forced to learn a new way of life, the life of an ant, under the tutelage of the kindly Hova (Roberts).The Ant Bully's subtext is as transparent as you'll find; Lucas represents Christians while the ants are Muslims and the message is although we are different in many ways, we are fundamentally the same (nothing new to us there but it's important to remind the children).There are numerous attacks on America's aggressive foreign policy "To attack without reason, without provocation, is just barbaric" to which the reply is "I didn't know ants had feelings or families". Apart from the climatic battle scene, which could rival Return Of The Jedi's final showdown, there's not a lot of action nor a great deal of excitement or momentum in The Ant Bully as the writers try for significance rather than another wham-bam rollercoaster movie. The lack of laughs, too, is a disappointment, but those kids who revel in the micro universes of insect life should get a kick out of it.
