We Bought a Zoo (PG)

HHH

Dir: Cameron Crowe

With: Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church

Running time: 123 minutes

CAMERON Crowe's family drama has cuteness running through it like a kitten chasing after a ball of wool. There is Matt Damon as an widower dad of two adorable children, Scarlett Johansson as a hippy dippy zookeeper, and enough animals to stuff a safari park. Whoopee.

Lions? You got them. Tiger, bear, kangaroo, zebra? The only way this film could be more huggable is if they supplied a baby panda with each cinema ticket.

What just about pulls the picture back from being insufferably twee is Crowe's light touch when it comes to heavy emotional content. As the billboards trumpet, Crowe was the helmer of Jerry Maguire, one of the best family films of the Nineties because the tale of the commitment phobic sports agent and the single mum wasn't a conventional family film at all. Funny, moving, a sports drama, a romance, Crowe put together a remarkably tutti-frutti mix.

We Bought A Zoo is far more vanilla affair, and suffers for it. It is a picture that comes and goes easily, not making much of an impression. It is only afterwards, and in the rare moments when Crowe and his cast let fly dramatically, that its quiet class is evident. Among that cast, it is Sideways' Thomas Haden Church who does the most to keep the film on the straight and narrow.

The film is loosely based on the true story of newspaper columnist and DIY expert, Benjamin Mee. In reality, Mee is British and his zoo is in Dartmoor. In the movie, Mee is played by Matt Damon and the wildlife park is in California. That's Hollywood for you.

When the film begins Mee has recently lost his wife and is struggling to cope with being a lone parent. Deciding what he, his teenage son and young daughter need is a new start, he bravely packs in the job and finds a house he likes in the country. Just one hitch – it has a zoo attached.

Helping him with the stressful transition from writer to zoo owner is a band of keepers and assorted eccentric types, among them Glasgow's Angus Macfadyen. Playing wildman Peter MacCready, Macfadyen duly chews the scenery from first to last frames. The head keeper is Scarlett Johansson. If you have trouble imagining the impossibly glamorous Ms Johansson as someone who would gladly be up to her knees in tiger droppings every day, she wears jeans, an anorak, has bed-head hair and sports the kind of "no make-up make-up" that only top make up artists can achieve. In short, she just about gets away with it. Carrying a bucket helps immeasurably.

Also helping the mix along are young Colin Ford, playing Mee's son, and Maggie Elizabeth Jones as his daughter. Ford has the tougher part playing a sullen teen who is angry with the world and his dad in particular. Crowe takes his time looking at the relationship, and though you might find the outcome pat, how Damon and Ford get there, each mumbling and bumbling their way towards the other, has a rumble of authenticity.

That's Damon at work, though, a solid, Mount Rushmore presence in any movie. Here, he is an all-American dad type but still cool with it. Before Damon, Crowe's best-known go-to leading man was Tom Cruise, star of Jerry Maguire and Vanilla Sky. In the film's duller moments you might like to pass the time imagining how Cruise would have fared playing a zoo owner. One imagines there would be a lot of jumping on rocks, Oprah sofa-style, and scaring the fur off lions with his roaring.

The duller moments are caused by there being not much more to the story than a family slowly coming to terms with their grief. When set beside this, the sub-plot about whether or not the zoo will pass its inspection by the local authorities is decidedly small beer. One of the film's more edge of the seat moments, for example, involves a faulty door catch.

If Damon is the film's old reliable, Haden Church is the wild card, adding much-needed salt to the sweetness, raising the picture above your average family film, and generating laughs. As Benjamin's more cynical brother, he is the voice of brutal reason, questioning his sibling's sanity in buying the place and trying to drag him out of his depression in other ways. As he puts it, "travel the stages of grief, but stop just before the zebras".

That is one of the standout lines in a so-so script by Crowe and Aline Brosh McKenna, the writer of The Devil Wears Prada. Add a cool score by Iceland's Jon Thor Birgisson (Vanilla Sky, The Life Aquatic, 127 Hours), and what emerges is a picture that makes for pleasant enough viewing, even if it is more of a walk in the municipal park than a safari park.