Filled to the sorcerous brim with slapdash My First Tolkien characters, gratuitous (OK, kinda pretty) CGI segments and more aurally paralyzing fantasy names (Eglantine! Otulissa! Allomere! HARK!) than a caffeine-addled Dungeons & Dragons session, Legend of the Guardians just too much of too many things at one time. This barrage-of-stimuli approach usually works for director Zack Snyder — see nerd-drool entries like 300 and Watchmen — but in the case of this animated adaptation of Kathryn Lasky’s children’s book series, it’s downright stultifying. Jim Sturgess and Ryan Kwanten voice Soren and Kludd, two owlet brothers who are captured and enslaved by a cabal of evil owls led by Metalbeak (Joel Edgerton), who holy shit wears a metal mask even though he’s an owl. Soren and his owl girlfriend, Gylfie (Emily Barclay), eventually escape into the outstretched wings of the Guardians, another owl race that thinks wearing metal masks is cool, except they stand for good, while the vengeful Kludd stays behind to become one of the baddie owls (SIBLING OWL RIVALRY!). There are owl training montages, there’s goofy owl fighting and dramatic owl stand-offs, they learn valuable owl lessons about themselves and other owls … you know the score. Not even Snyder’s master grasp on action can overcome such derivative feather-ruffling. —Drew Lazor

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