9

9 is a new film about a bunch of old socks in a post-apocalyptic alternate universe fighting a machine which appears to have fallen out of The Matrix. It’s completely rubbish.

I can’t even bring myself to explain why it’s so bad. The writers couldn’t be arsed to provide an interesting and coherent story so I don’t see why I should go to any effort telling you what it is that makes it so crushingly awful. It would have been more appropriate to call it 4, because that’s what it would get out of 10, and most of that would be for the animation which, irritatingly, is jeffing marvellous.

 9 is the third animated film I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, each of which uses voice ‘talent’ in a different way:

• Up – Uses unknown actors to provide perfectly appropriate voices for a grumpy old codger and an excitable schoolboy. 
• Fantastic Mr Fox – Uses ludicrously expensive A-listers to provide perfectly inappropriate voices for foxes.
• 9 – Uses the equivalent of Tesco Value (but still expensive) stars like Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly to provide bland voices for sentient rag dolls, which you don’t even realise were voiced by famous actors until the credits roll, prompting you to think that maybe they should have just dragged some homeless people in off the street to do the voices, which would not only have been cheaper but would also have had some humanitarian benefit, I mean, apparently Martin Landau was in it but I didn’t recognise his voice and I couldn’t work out which one he was so what’s the point of that, he was in North By Northwest for Alfred’s sake!

One of these methods works very well. The other two don’t. Can you tell which is which?

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