Open Season 3 (2010)

Open Season 3 arrives with the weary dignity of a direct-to-video sequel, which is to say it arrives without much dignity at all. The third installment in a franchise that began with a reasonably charming woodland comedy now finds Boog the grizzly abandoned by his friends, who have chosen family obligations over the annual guys' trip. He wanders into a Russian traveling circus, swaps places with a lazy lookalike named Doug, and falls for Ursa, a tightrope-walking bear with a firm grip on her own worth. The animation is serviceable. The plot is recycled. Critics were unkind, and the box office was not asked for an opinion, since the film went straight to shelves in the United States.

We are told the circus is Russian, which supplies a scattering of accents and a camelid named Alistair. This is texture, not thesis. The forest setting never becomes an environmental argument, the circus never becomes a labor parable, and the animals' various body types never become a conversation about self-acceptance. Ursa is competent and admired, but her competence is a plot device, not a manifesto. Doug's deception is resolved with an apology and a hug, the sort of moral arithmetic that has powered children's entertainment since the days of Aesop. Nobody in this film is attempting to instruct the audience on the structure of power.

Its lesson is that family and friendship can coexist, delivered with a shrug and a Willie Nelson singalong. There is no sermon here, no agenda, no cultural instruction. There is a bear, a deer, a circus, and eighty minutes of mild diversion. For those of us who catalog such things, the film offers a clean slate and very little to write home about.