If you dig through the produce in your grocery store to look for the best stuff, then you’ll enjoy looking past the antics of animated vegetables in “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything,” the latest parable in the VeggieTales video series.

The film is a noticeable departure from traditional veggie fare. Longtime fans will immediately notice the lack of central character Bob the Tomato. Christians will undoubtedly pay attention to the fact that the film never explicitly refers to the Christian faith.

Instead, the movie comes off as a cross between an allegory (similar to the Narnia film “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”) and an action-adventure (trying to build off the success of Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” series).

Larry the Cucumber, Pa Grape and Mr. Lunt, all assuming new names to fit their characters, dream of leaving their lowly jobs at a dinner theater to star in the swashbuckling stage show.

However, each is held back by weaknesses (timidity, laziness and lack of confidence, respectively). The excitement begins when the three get sucked into a real pirate story of the past, thanks to a device called a HelpSeeker.
Once on board a real mission, the “pirates who don’t do anything” must decide to overcome their shortcomings to face a rescue mission that will bring them into the path of the evil pirate Robert the Terrible.

The film provides its share of comedy through the unlikely heroes while also incorporating both a few silly musical numbers in the classic sense and a few more modern tunes.

After turning cheese curls into vicious enemies and featuring a rock monster in the form of the lovable Michelin Man, it’s safe to say that few films will ever be as entertainingly far-fetched and clever as anything VeggieTales.

Big Idea, Inc. continues to chase after dreams of profiting from VeggieTales movies at the box office, but their latest effort is no spectacular improvement over their first film which sent the studio into bankruptcy.

A simple plot, a comic bunch of greens with no hands, and a hidden spiritual meaning which will be overseen by secular theater-goers combines to form a $15 million budget film. To date it has earned approximately one-third of that in theaters.

The film, which runs 85 minutes, is one of few G-rated movies to come from Universal Pictures in the last decade. It is directed by Mike Nawrocki and written by Phil Vischer.