Opening this kid targeted animated fare against the behemoth known as The Dark Knight was a calculated gamble that 20th Century Fox was willing to take. With most of the weekend audience heading to see Batman, there is still a need for more family-oriented fare, and this light-hearted adventure would seem to be the perfect choice for families who have already plowed through Wall*E and Kung Fu Panda. Having already taken in the brilliance of The Dark Knight, and feeling the need to lighten the dark mood, the decision was made to give Space Chimps a shot at counterbalancing the cinematic experience. Unfortunately, Space Chimps failed to deliver the goods.

After sitting through the brief 81-minute feature, I was left flat. Sure, the film was innocent enough, but it failed to deliver anything even remotely compelling. Of course, anything following so closely on the wake of Wall*E is bound to pale by comparison, especially when it also has a science fiction bent.

I have to say that my first complaint about the movie would be about its advertising, at least what limited advertising I have seen. The movie has not received a lot of support from 20th Century Fox, and the trailer does not even touch on what the movie actually contains. The trailer plays up the chimps going into space aspect, but completely ignores the alien planet aspect, which actually takes up a lot of the story time. Unfortunately, anything of interest takes place with just the chimps with no aliens involved. As soon as we get aliens involved, my interest level plummeted, in addition to wondering why there was no mention of them in the advertisements.

Now, what is the film about? Well, the title gives the general idea that chimps and space will be involved, so if you guessed that, you'd be heading down the right track. The story has these chimps being sent into space where they are sucked through a wormhole. On the other side of said hole, they crash on an alien world where they become involved in a battle between a powerful dictator named Zartog and everyone else on the planet. I'm getting ahead of myself.

As we open, we are introduced to Ham III (Andy Samberg), grandson of Ham, the first chimp sent into space (believe it or not, Ham was that chimp's name), a circus performer who specializes in being a furry cannonball. One evening, during a performance, Ham III has a moment where he realizes he is not living up to the legacy left by his family; still he loves the circus spotlight. Meanwhile, down in Florida, the space program is in trouble after a multi-billion dollar unmanned probe and an evil senator is looking to shut the program down.