The website for Adam Rex’s 2007 book The True Meaning of Smekday contained a short “info-feature” designed to teach Earthlings about life under interplanetary occupation by the Boov. There’s little to match the low-budget wit and economy of that “human learning video” in Over the Hedge co-director Tim Johnson’s noisily empty film. The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons plays awkward-but-lovable alien Oh as a variation on Sheldon (neither understand human emotions), the accident-prone Boov drone awkwardly befriending feisty teenager Tip (Rihanna) after her mother (Jennifer Lopez) is relocated – along with the rest of the human race – to Australia. The CG visuals are bright and shiny and the pace endlessly frenetic, but it’s all as emptily overproduced as Rihanna’s characterless pop soundtrack contributions. Steve Martin has fun as the pompous Captain Smek, but this remains little more than colourfully inoffensive.
