Peter Lord and Nick Park, the creators of Wallace and Gromit, have crafted a devilishly clever clay animation feature film that is as thoroughly British in its humor as it is enjoyable to watch. A band of hyper kinetic European chickens, imprisoned in a stalag type egg farm run by a tyrannical husband and wife team, struggle to escape with the questionable aid of a cocky American Rooster named "Rocky" (voice by Mel Gibson - Lethal Weapon). Rocky is a circus performing Rooster who is inexplicably able to fly, or so it seems. It only follows that Rocky should be able to teach the fat little egg-laying chicks to get airborne long enough to escape over the barbed wire fence that keeps them on a course with early death when they stop producing enough eggs.

Beyond implications about animal cruelty in food processing farms, Chicken Run pokes fun at cheer-for-the-hero escape stories, and the very cliché of the American male hero. The chickens trapped on Mrs. Tweedy’s (voice by Miranda Richardson - Sleepy Hollow) Yorkshire poultry farm wouldn’t stand a chance of ever escaping were not for their fearless and caring leader, Ginger (voice by Julia Sawalha - Absolutely Fabulous). Ginger rifles the group through every escape scenario she can imagine before landing on the idea of going over the fence instead of under. When Rocky, the American "lone free ranger" rooster, crashes into camp, it seems like the answer to Ginger’s plans for the freedom of her flock and also for her romantic heart. But Rocky is more of a motivational speaker than a liberator of hens. Little facts about chickens and roosters not being able to fly, and roosters not being able to lay eggs are clarified in the funniest of ways.

When Mrs. Tweedy discovers an ad for a chicken pie-manufacturing machine that promises to make her a bundle in cash, it gives the movie a centerpiece comedy sequence that rivals anything of the most knee-slapping scenes from Billy Wilder to Mel Brooks. The hapless Ginger falls into grave danger of becoming the next day’s chicken pie as Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy test out their monstrously large cooking and packaging contraption. There are slippery slides, gravy shooting spray guns, mixed vegetables, and a heck of a lot of heat from oven burners that Ginger ends up dodging from conveyor belt to cardboard box.

Chicken Run is a classy melding of story ideas from movies like The Great Escape (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Stalag 17 (1953), and even Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). It’s easy to take for granted the painstaking process of "frame-at-a-time" filmmaking that clay animation requires when watching Chicken Run because the filmmakers have done such a picturesque job of seamlessly blending flawless set and figure design with story and character. Brought to the big screen by large crew of inspired animators and modelmakers, Chicken Run multiplies the well-rounded effect of Wallace and Gromit by a thousand fold. Where it was possible for an audience to get bogged down by the somber color scheme of Walace and Gromit and its not-quite-lifelike-enough clay design, Chicken Run compensates with a crowd of quirky chickens capable of acting like real chickens when the farmers are snooping.

Kid’s movies are just as important to the summer season as the string of Hollywood blockbusters that rarely live up to audience expectations. Chicken Run is every bit as ridiculous as the title suggests, and carries with it a look and style that, while referencing a tradition of escape movies, surprises an audience with its ingenuity and cheeky brand of British satire. The little plasticine-and-silicone figures that portray the two human characters oddly resemble people we all have seen before. Clay animation may not be any position to squeeze out movies like Shaft, but crappy cartoon movies like Titan A.E. don’t stand a chance against the inestimable talents, the people behind Chicken Run.

Jim Carrey is hilarious, but only to a point. It’s a blessing that screenwriter/director brothers, Peter and Bobby Farrelly got Carrey to star in their latest incongruous gross-out fest, Me, Myself & Irene. Carrey plays Charlie Baileygates, a Rhode Island motorcycle cop with a bad case of Jekyll-and-Hyde. Carrey’s desperately over-the-top performance as nice guy Charlie and dirty boy Hank gives the movie its vital charge beyond the 3 or 4 sight gags that sucker punch an audience fits of hysteria. Part road movie, part love story, and part suspense plot, Me, Myself & Irene suffers from plot and casting problems that the Farrelly’s last movie, There’s Something About Mary, was able to hop-scotch beyond because of its shock value jizz-humor supported by Cameron Diaz’s disarmingly nuanced performance as ‘straight-man’ to a whirlwind of well timed slapstick comedy. Carrey takes a flying dive on the film’s bomb of a script and, to his credit, absorbs much of the stilted disunity of Me, Myself & Irene’s graceless pacing and storyline.

The Farrelly brothers (Dumb and Dumber) have become famous for toilet/spitball humor that redeems itself while you’re watching it because of the high-wire daring involved in flashing visually displaced, psycho-sexual reality at an audience with a knowing wink. For example when the tightly wound Charlie first teeters over into his evil twin Hank, he notices a busty mother nursing her baby on a public bench. In the next scene her right breast is in Hank’s mouth and he’s the one drinking mother’s milk. If the scene could be construed as pornographic, it’s inoculated by the film’s context, and to a lesser extent by the fact that Hank is, well, nursing. And just in case the breast sucking was a bit too heavy, the following scene has Hank driving with a milk mustache. It’s a way of diminishing the pornographic effect of the previous scene by way of an immediately recognizable term of advertising that soothes the audience into acceptance of what they’ve just witnessed.

In a big way, movies like Me, Myself & Irene have emerged to quantify the kind of real American weirdness and stupidity that gets repeatedly exploited on television shows like The Jerry Springer Show. It’s a backlash against America’s technology driven cash mentality and sexually repressive society. This kind of humor shows obtainable extremes being reached with whomever and whatever is around at the moment. But that fact alone doesn’t compensate for Me, Myself & Irene’s kitchen sink mentality of heaping together a bunch of half-baked ideas and calling it a movie.

Chris Cooper (Matewan, American Beauty) is painfully miscast as the bad guy pursuing Charlie and Irene across state lines because of some vague association Irene (Renee Zellweger - Jerry Maquire) has with the EPA over her last job. Cooper’s performance is a casualty of the Farrelly brothers insistence on using traditionally dramatic actors in their comedies in hope that the actor’s presence will somehow compensate for other lacking areas in the script. The plan backfires most noticeably with Cooper, who looks like he’s trapped on the wrong film set, and to a lesser extent with Renee Zellweger, whose reactions to the insanity around her are never clear enough.