<Review by: Sailesh Ghelani>

Directed by Tim Johnson. Starring Jim Parsons, Rihanna, Steve Martin, Jennifer Lopez

Meant for kids ages 6 and below, Home is uninspiring, dull, annoying and badly written.

Home uses lots of cutesy elements to evoke a chuckle and an ‘Aww’ but they’re so trite and vacuous that you stare blankly at the screen or simply nod off. And both Jim Parsons and Rihanna’s voiceovers are so grating on the ears that you feel like your head is going to explode after a while. The strange dialect of the alien Boov doesn’t help much what with lines like ‘I must say the sorry’. And what’s with ‘Boovs this and boovs that’? Sounds like ‘boobs’!

So the Boovs are a race of cute little colour-changing aliens that flee every time they’re in trouble and their most recent nemesis, the Gorg, have caused them to seek refuge on planet Earth where they displace the humans and other non-essential items to make it theirs. One Boov, a chap called ‘Oh’ (Jim Parsons), isn’t very popular with his people since he is overly sociable and makes lots of ‘mistakes’. He stumbles upon a young girl who has escaped the Boov suction rays with her cat Pig. Tip (Rihanna) wants to search for her mom (Jennifer Lopez). Oh inadvertently lets the Gorg where they are and now his leader Captain Smek (Steve Martin) wants him caught and erased. The whole film is basically about the chase.

In between chase sequences you get to see the frustratingly annoying Captain Smek (Steve Martin) try and be funny riding a vacuum cleaner. And there’s a brief scene showing Tip’s mom inquiring about her daughter.

If you think Jim Parsons irritates the shit out of his co-characters on The Big Bang Theory, you’ll understand what they feel like when you listen to him and his peculiar voice with the poor English the Boovs speak. Rihanna as Tip is not better. All this is mainly the fault of poor writing by Matt Ember and Tom J Astle. It doesn’t help that the soundtrack is absolutely infuriating with Rihanna songs popping up in scenes that don’t correlate with what’s being sung. It’s like they said we have her songs so now we need to stick ‘em somewhere.

With no story, no good dialogue, no funny moments, no great characters and a predictable as hell ending, Home is one of the worst animated films I’ve seen in a long time and it shows us why Pixar is far better at making them than Dreamworks.