Well, she's big all right. As advertised. But not really as big as you might have expected. The otherworldly spacecraft in Independence Day, Roland Emmerich's hommage to the alien-invader fables of the 1950s, was sufficiently larger than any previous such vehicle as to carve out a special niche for itself in the science-fiction library. But the magnified reptile in the same director's hommage to the mutant-monster fables of that same period is not proportionately as large. Not anywhere near. Certainly she is large enough that the pull of gravity ought to have made her less light on her feet than the average gecko, and although a lot of attention is paid to the thunderous, ground-rattling, automobile-bouncing footfalls of the beast, this seems to cross the moviemakers' minds only during her slow approach, never at her top speed. In the latter gear, she can outrace Army attack helicopters through the maze of downtown Manhattan, but then later, and without any noticeable limp, she experiences much greater difficulty catching up to the taxi cab in which our nominal heroes are riding. Size, as the ad campaign drilled into us, does indeed matter. But so does logic. And this animated monster has a long way to go to match either the unbalanced sense of scale or the internal consistency of Tex Avery's King-Size Canary. With Matthew Broderick, Maria Pitillo, Jean Reno, Kevin Dunn, Harry Shearer. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd