Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling is not the Without a Paddle film starring
Seth Green. It's not really a sequel to that film either - the dismal Nature's
Calling was hardly "sequel worthy" anyway. Nature's Calling does feature three
guys rafting into the Oregonian wilderness, although in this case they are
searching for an old high school classmate who's disappeared into the woods
instead of the infamous D.B Cooper, but the similarities end there. Well, except
for the fact that neither film is funny.
Nature's Calling is a bit odd in the fact that nothing funny happens for the
first third of the film or so. It's not that it tries to be funny but isn't,
it's that it doesn't even try. It starts off as a buddy movie in which two old
friends set off on a wilderness adventure to escape the drudgery of their jobs
and rekindle their bonds of friendship. When the film decides that it wants to
be a comedy instead, it does so by introducing computer animated squirrels with
a strong animosity towards the movie's heroes. This transition is just plain
bizarre, and it sets the stage for the schizophrenic nature of the rest of the
film. One moment a guy is having a heart-to-heart with the woman he's carried a
crush for since high school, the next he's being pecked by an animated
hummingbird. The buddies have a falling out, and suddenly one is kidnapped by a
half-crazed squirrel researcher who's supposed to be Al Gore's brother and is
played by former NFL star Jerry Rice while wearing an enormous fake beard. Once
you reach the film's predictable conclusion, you won't have laughed at the odd
attempts at comedy and will have lost any connection to the buddies that you may
have formed at the beginning of the film. This isn't the worst movie out there,
but there are many, many simply average movies that are far better than this
one.
