In a different movie, also, a moment in which Alvin reveals that he knows how to dispose of a corpse would have been randomly, morbidly funny, but this one can't even get that joke to work. I will give the movie some credit for only containing two fart jokes and one eating-your-own poop joke, but that's all I'm giving it. Otherwise, the script spews out pop-culture references, a supposedly nostalgic redo of "The Chipmunk Song" (you know, the one with the hula-hoop?), and a bunch of remixes of songs sung in that eardrum-piercing engineered falsetto.

The plot follows the chipmunks rise to fame. They become overnight sensations with the hula-hoop song. They have a falling out with Dave after trying to get him to reunite with Claire, who thinks the whole "chipmunks ruining my life" is a story he makes up but somehow doesn't make the connection when a trio of chipmunks becomes Billboard favorites. Dave also doesn't like using the term "family," so when he tells a random woman at the grocery store that some days he just wants to take his three "boys," put them in a box, and leave them in the park, she just doesn't get his plight.

The chipmunks go live with Ian, who gives them the plush life. Ian exhausts them during tour after tour (coffee is the solution) with Chipmunk groupies looking disturbingly lustfully at them. They become despondent (there really might as well be heavy drugs involved in this claptrap plot), and it all culminates in a climactic, pratfall-laden chase with Ian's goons and an anticlimactic solution to the whole thing. The whole production looks and feels slapdash, hastily assembled and cheaply produced.

Just so you don't think, what with my bleeding eardrum reference and non-response to the movie's assertion that the chipmunks seem "somewhat evil," that I inherently hate these characters, I grew up in the '80s and watched Alvin, Simon, and Theodore in the cartoons. With the lifeless, agonizing Alvin and the Chipmunks, that's officially the end of my time with them. Unless, heaven forbid, they make a sequel.