Review of Rusty: The Great Rescue

Introduction

Rusty: The Great Rescue is another one of those "family" films which feature a cast of talking animals. Aimed purely at kids the film tells the story of Rusty, a dog living in a farm based animal shelter with his kid owners and their grandparents as well as a host of other animals. It recounts his attempts to keep his adopted owners and latterly his own brothers & sisters from the hands of his the kids scheming parents.

Video

The video quality overall is average, nothing special at all. Visual grain is common though not too bad and you can`t help but notice that the overall film quality is sadly lacking. It`s often particularly easy to see where they`ve added the computer generated "talking" effects in which sours the overall effect; mind you the kids probably won`t notice that so much anyway. It`s a low budget family film and looks it basically.

Audio

The sound is bearable, a reasonable Dolby Digital 2.0 affair but nothing special. Much of the music, especially the theme tune, I found somewhat grating. It`s aimed at the kids so perhaps that`s why but the music was just plain irritating to me.

The voice acting is a bit of a mixed bag, some such as the turtles aren`t too bad but for the most part the voices are often off; a lack of effort really on behalf of the voice actors. That coupled with the poor "talking" special effects just mean the thing seems even more fake than it needed to be.

Features

Nothing at all in the way of extras but then it is a budget DVD release at least.

Conclusion

"Family" films always seem to be almost purely for kids, recent releases such as Shrek and Cats & Dogs changed that slightly by managing to appeal to a wider cross-section of the audience. Unfortunately Rusty: The Great Rescue manages nothing of the sort. Its story is simple, characters clichéd and the whole film tends to smack of over-sentimentality.

Kids will probably watch it once or twice but it`s not even the type of one that they`ll watch repeatedly much to their parent`s annoyance. (Hmmm, perhaps that`s a good thing?) It`s a low budget family film for a low budget price point but ultimately you are getting what you pay for. Cheap, fun and harmless but definitely for the kids only.