Salt Lake Tribune Review

Get your umbrellas ready, because plenty of zany fun rains down in “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” a computer-animated adaptation of the 1978 children’s book.

Be warned: This delightful screwball comedy about a boy who invents a machine that turns rain into food also is likely to rob young viewers’ appetite for hamburgers and spaghetti. That’s because the movie transforms junk meals into even sloppier gobs of grease.

Yet what makes this all agreeable to the taste buds is Flint (voiced by “Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader), a bright, socially inept but likable boy who dreams of becoming an inventor and making something of himself in his dreary island town.

One day, Flint invents a machine that launches into the sky and makes it rain whatever food you want. The townspeople, getting pummeled from above with hamburgers, hot dogs and other treats, embrace the new science. So does the town’s greedy, overzealous mayor (voiced by Bruce Campbell), who intends on turning Flint’s invention into the opportunity of a lifetime for tourism.

The danger occurs when the machine is overused. Then it’s liable to turn the food it creates into some kind of horrible genetic transformation.

Of course, things go awry, and the delight is watching the transformation of ice cream, Jell-O and other food into gelatinous blobs of epic proportions that organically grow a mind of their own.

And amid all the craziness, there is a charming relationship subplot that reminds us not everything is about flying food. Flint falls for the equally nerdy television weather girl (Anna Faris), a match made in edible heaven.

The only thing that hampers the movie from being a complete culinary success is an ending that runs a bit long, as well as the quality of the Sony computer animation, which is a step or two behind the work from the brilliant minds at Pixar (“Up,” “WALL-E”).

But “Meatballs” (which must be seen in 3-D at select theaters for its kaleidoscopic layers of flying and transforming food) is a surprisingly funny and entertaining movie for adults and kids.

And for those of us with gluttony in our hearts, it’s also a delightful piece of wish fulfillment.

-- Vince Horiuchi

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