Shark Tale (2004)

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE, WHO NEEDS ANEMONIES? Sometimes you come across a film you want to throw back

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Shark Tale

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Let's say there's someone, somewhere, who has never heard of Robert De Niro or Will Smith. Okay, maybe that's too unlikely. Try this instead: Let's say there's somebody who isn't a Sopranos maven, or a student of the contrasting visions of womanhood offered by movie stars Angelina Jolie and Renée Zellweger. That person may live an otherwise fulfilled and accomplished life, no doubt. But a thorough, in-crowd enjoyment of Shark Tale will not be among those accomplishments, because the noisiest laughs in this watery animated comedy are reserved for those who value self-referential winks above all else.

The movie may float its plot on the unlikely alliance between Oscar (Smith), a boastful little hustler of a fish dreaming of the high life, and Lenny (Jack Black), a big, gentle shark who disappoints his father, Don Lino (De Niro) -- capo di tutti of the great whites -- with his gummy vegetarian ways. It may supply the stereotypical competition for Oscar's attention between a pretty, unpretentious girl fish (Zellweger) and a glamorous, gold-digger woman fish (Jolie), with the catch going, of course, to the virginal over the sexual. But the central conflict itself -- about how Oscar briefly enjoys a hero's fame based on a lie -- is an artificial reef. The characters are underdeveloped even for 2-D players. And the moral -- that being loved and unfamous is more important than being a big shot -- is so fatuous as to be condescending. Pleasures, then, go to the gleaners of detail: Don Lino himself bears a De Niro-like beauty spot; Sopranos regulars Michael Imperioli and Vincent Pastore provide shark-mob voices. GoodFellas director Martin Scorsese has fun sending up his own fast-talking intensity as Don Lino's puffer-fish foot soldier. And those who know the provenance of the line ''Are you not entertained?'' can feel superior to those who don't.

I'd hate to think that Shark Tale jumps the shark within the genre -- that shout-outs to more original antecedents, enhanced by gleaming CGI, now pass for innovation at DreamWorks, the home of Shrek (and the pop-culture-giddy Shrek 2). So I'll assume that this animated spectacle is a fat, lazy air bubble gone astray before the studio sucks it up to dive deep again.