Mr. Popper's Penguins

It’s curious that anyone would release a movie about penguins the week summer officially begins—especially a movie this bad. And yet here is Mr. Popper’s Penguins, a Jim Carrey vehicle presumably designed to make him a player in the coveted family-comedy market. That it does so rather unsuccessfully might reveal more about why it was released in the summer: The film would clearly garner more attention with a chill in the air, and more attention is precisely what this doesn’t need. Unfunny, uninteresting and with no real aim to engage children outside of the fact that it features penguins, Mr. Popper is flat-out cynical moviemaking, the result of the machine that spits out movies that hit bullet-points with no emotion and little care.