Alvin and The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009)

The film's intelligence goes no further than the stupid title

The world famous singing pre-teen chipmunk trio return to contend with the pressures of school, celebrity, and a rival female music group known as The Chipettes.

Let me make it perfectly clear that I have not seen the first Alvin and The Chipmunks film, so I will be reviewing this as a film in its own merit, and not a sequel. But to be honest, I don't think I would enjoy this more if I did see the first film.


The plot is nothing more than the typical fish out of water in high school storyline, and plays out as typical and expectant as you'd imagine it to be. The reasoning behind the chipmunks going back to school is especially weak and contrived, it's like the writers could come up with nothing better

I found it pretty harsh how the jocks were picking on the chipmunks because the chipmunks were getting all of the girls attention. Just for this, the jocks wanted to beat up the chipmunks, who are immensely smaller than the jocks. I mean, if it was a talking baby who joined the school and got all of the girls' attention instead, would the jocks try and beat the baby up? It's just typical and lazy storytelling, and the writers don't even try to change it from being such. The film rarely engages the audience, and is just very boring.

Jason Lee is lazily written off, because I guess the filming schedule conflicted with him doing nothing, giving way to Toby, played by Zachary Levi. Despite him being brilliant in Chuck, Levi is utterly wasted here, as he doesn't do much than play video games, reminisce over high school, fail to help the Chipmunks and make puppy dog eyes at his love interest, who he doesn't even get to kiss. When checking out the Chipmunks, one thing was quite apparent to me: Alvin is such a dick. He puts his own needs before his groups, he's the typical archetype of the one person in the band who believes he's better than the whole band, and you cannot stand him in the slightest.

It's times like these you can only hope an anvil is hanging above

The singing is utterly dreadful, as the sped up, squeaky covers of songs manage to effortlessly get on your nerves and make you wish someone would squash those bloody chipmunks. When you're subjected to the squeaky tones of the Chipmunks and the Chippettes, you'll be wishing you watched the Glee 3D Concert instead of this, and yes, I do mean that.

The only feature throughout the entire film that I would consider to be the slightest bit redeemable is David Cross. He plays the role as Ian, the evil record producer, and despite the character being one-note and one-dimensional, Cross plays the character utterly well

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel is a film that the kiddies will enjoy very much. As for everyone else who's left to watch it, prepare for a very long and arduous 88 minutes of lazy plotting, weak jokes and boredom from an utterly unengaging film.