Alvin And The Chipmunks

THE once great Hollywood film industry is officially on its knees.

Creatively spent, full of unhappy striking writers, and now left to rummage through the toy box and exhuming the mothballed cartoons of its troubled youth.

And so with every other feature being created by the Judd Apatow juggernaught this year – and hot off the tail(s) of Scooby Doo and Garfield – comes the return of Alvin And The Chipmunks.

Theoretically at least, then, a live-action/animation version of the singing Chipmunks pretty much stands for everything that right-thinking film fanatics should be fervently fighting against.

But there's a problem. It's actually not that bad.

Not groundbreaking, mind you – not like The Snowman or Toy Story – but director Tim Hill's film is so breezy and utterly daft that it's perfect food for the kind of trash your mind occasionally craves after a long day in a steaming office.

The first surprise is that Jason Lee (of My Name is Earl fame) does a sufficiently decent job as the failing songwriter/boyfriend/general human-being Dave Seville.

He's hardly the most three-dimensional, nor most memorable of characters.

Yet it's to the likeable Lee's credit that he happily steps aside to play patsy to the three CGI rendered Chipmunks, who he enlists to pull him out of the mire into song writing stardom.

The next revelation is just how astonishing alive the computerised Alvin, Simon and Theodore (don't pretend like you'd forgotten their names) appear on screen.

Gone are soulless CGI characters, without a glimmer of life of emotion between their eyes. And yes, we're talking about you Scooby Doo and Beowulf.

These lifelike emoting ‘Monks effortlessly sail just the right side of mawkish, with their sadistic slapstick routines recalling the most vintage Tom And Jerry.

All this means that it probably doesn't matter that the plot is pure chipmunk droppings – as some truly desperate and heavy-handed attempts at pathos attest – because you'll be laughing too hard to care.

But mutter all this very quietly, as the official line from headquarters is that we still have unadulterated contempt for the reclamation of cartoon classics for a quick buck.

But on account of its gleeful, brainless pace and sheer belly-laugh quota, we'll let this VERY guilty pleasure slip through the good-taste net just this once.

Out now on DVD.