The first few scenes do get your hopes up. Who wouldn’t get a horselaugh from the sight of Zach Galifianakis, the wild child of “The Hangover,’’ as an FBI handler soberly discussing mission strategy with a digitally animated Cavia porcellus? The cast is high-end for this sort of thing: Sam Rockwell provides the voice of team leader Darwin - a sort of Tom Cruise of guinea pigs - and Penelope Cruz and Tracy Morgan are on hand as his colleagues in action, Juarez and Blaster. The great British character actor Bill Nighy plays the human villain, an international appliance titan with visions of world domination.
The voice of Speckles, a star-nosed mole who’s the team’s technical guru, turns out to be Nicolas Cage, recycling his adenoidal whine from “Peggy Sue Got Married.’’ Once the G-Force has its funding revoked by a meanie FBI overseer (Will Arnett) and the characters have to hit the pavement, they encounter a pet-shop guinea pig - a guinea porker, really - voiced by Jon Favreau. His cage-mate is the funniest character in the movie, a weaselly little hamster played by Brooklyn’s finest motormouth, Steve Buscemi.
(Here’s a game I play, by the way: When actors I generally respect show up in one of these silly summer behemoths, I always wonder if they have college-age kids. You’d be surprised how often they do. Buscemi does, and tuition isn’t getting any cheaper.)
The problem with “G-Force’’ is that its creativity, and thus its entertainment value, doesn’t extend an inch beyond the initial idea. The story line is a mishmash of every “Mission: Impossible’’ cliché in the playbook, and once the novelty of seeing them acted out by tiny furry hyperrealistic cartoon characters wears off, it’s like watching a Xerox of a Xerox.
