Color me...confused
About 1/3 into the movie, I was asking myself this question: Why does this movie have a 79% certified fresh critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes?
The Plot
Two deities, voiced by Kate Del Castillo and Ron Perlman, make a wager involving two young men, voiced by Diego Luna and Channing Tatum, on which one of them will marry their childhood crush, voiced by Zoe Saldana. The stakes? The kingdoms of the dead.
Analysis
Theatrically released kids movies, pretty much have a standard. That standard is, can adults find some form of enjoyment too? That standard for American cartoons was created by Walt Disney. His animated films contain heavy amounts of depth that didn't shy away from dark things, but was able to balance it well by sugarcoating the product into something kids can enjoy. Then Pixar took it a step further by having the notion that they make adult animated films that kids can enjoy and then fully understand once they grow up. Dreamworks accomplished this early on by being a little bit too adult, but eventually found the right balance once Guillermo Del Toro joined the group to oversee projects like Kung Fu Panda, Puss in Boots, and How to Train Your Dragon.
That is what separates American animation from the highly popular Japanese anime. Good american animation hides mature themes with visual splendor and incredible storytelling. Japanese anime does this too, depending on what type of genre they're dealing with. If anything, the one Japanese studio that has mastered, and outclasses, this American form of animation is probably Studio Ghibli. Their films are just as whimsical as any Pixar or new age Dreamworks film, yet they don't hide being mature. Rather, they have it in the right places and utilize them in the right ways. Because in the end, incredible storytelling is what counts.
That's not what I saw here.
Review
This movie is boring. Plain and simple. It is really boring. Which given all the talent behind this film, I'm astonished. But then again part of me should be surprised.
Guillermo Del Toro is one of my favorite directors, and has made one of my all time favorite comic book movies in Hellboy, but he attaches his name to a lot of things. And most of the time, just because his name is attached to it, does not mean it is good. It's a lesson that I should've learned whenever I saw the "Produced by Steven Spielberg" title card appear in the Transformers films, but perhaps I kept thinking because it is Del Toro, it might be different. I know that he wants to bring awareness of Mexican Culture to the states in a colorful way, and this project by animation director Jorge Gutierrez would've definitely been the best way to do so. If only the movie wasn't so... cliche.
Now, I like a lot of cliche movies. Just look at my reviews for Dracula Untold and Hercules. Both are really predictable and filled with cliches that are used only somewhat effectively. But while they are pretty bad movies, they are pretty damn good entertaining movies. This isn't. Now that sounds like a bad comparison because this is a kids film. But from my analysis section, you can pretty much pick up why I'm going to say this is a bad film: There is no subtlety or depth.
The characters, Manolo (Diego Luna), Joaquin (Channing Tatum) and Maria (Zoe Saldana) are extremely cliche. By extreme I mean you can predict already who is going to do what and even what a character is going to say. While each of them are distinct, they're more like caricatures of the cliches they are. Manolo is the dreamer, Joaquin is the macho hero and Maria is an independent woman who loves books. If you know the cliches of those characters, now think about what lines those cliches usually say and you'll be surprised when they say all the lines you predicted they'll say. While it's okay to have stock characters say cliche things, there at least has to be a lot more creativity with how they're said or even a few tweaks to the stock characters. Not only that, the supporting cast was extremely cliche. And you can probably predict what they're going to say as well and be right. This automatically kills any sense of character depth because it makes them all feel like they're picked up from a toy box. In fact, the frame story is they come from a toy box. But Toy Story did not feel this cliche and predictable. And they had way more personality than these puppets.
And the story. My god the story was just not paced well at all. Some portions of this movie was dedicated to having it being told as a story to detention students by a sexy museum tour guide. And yes, it is made clear that she is sexy from how all the male character act around her. Then nearly 20 minutes of the movie is spent with the characters as children, which was highly unnecessary when it could've been summed up in just one to five minutes. Then almost 45 minutes of the movie is dedicated to the adult main characters as they childishly fight over Maria. Which honestly should've just been the first 20 minutes of the movie. Then when the interesting part that takes place in the two Underworlds happen, it is only the last remaining 20 minutes of the movie. That portion should've been the entire run time of the movie. The trailers make it seem like an hour of the movie will take place in the Land of the Remembered and the Land of the Forgotten, but nope, it just sped right through. This is mainly because it was trying to be epic by telling the story over decades when it really just needed to be told when Maria becomes a woman and the two guys are fighting over her. To put it simply, if you saw the trailer for the movie, you've seen the whole movie, and the trailer was better.
And what I'm flabbergasted by the most is the critical acclaim for this film. Most of the acclaim has the excuse that "the visuals are spectacular, even the story was so-so." In my opinion Sucker Punch had spectacular visuals and the story was so-so. Yet you don't see me giving that movie a positive rating, and I love Zack Snyder too. As far as the visuals go, this movie was not even anywhere remotely visually interesting. Yes, it does get interesting to look at once the character dies and goes to the Underworlds, but the movie doesn't spend too much time there. Instead it spends more time in the boring living world where boring dialogue just makes everything in this movie boring. And while the visuals of the Underworld was definitely something, it was not spectacular. A still image makes it spectacular, but in motion it is pretty bland. Compare the visual excitement of Rise of the Guardians' Santa's workshop to the "visual excitement" of the Land of the Remembered in this film and you'll notice that one is a million times superior to the other.
There are some good things I should say though. Zoe Saldana is great and her voice is charming as the overtly cliched "I don't need a man" Maria. But Ron Perlman as the film's antagonist Xibalba was surprising for me. He nailed the Spanish accent and spoke with a cadence that made his voice unrecognizable for me. So that was a big surprise. But other than that, this movie was too short to have any depth yet felt like it was 3 hours long because of the boring characters and odd pacing.
Final Thoughts
If none of that made any sense then I'll just put it as this. It is a kids movie in the sense that only a child below the age of six will enjoy this movie. Meaning it is the type of movie you'd find as a straight to dvd release rather than a big theatrical one. Theatrical animated movies are indeed targeted for children, but the best animated movies are the ones made for adults yet children are capable of understanding them too. This movie fails in delivering a nice representation of Mexican Culture and as an animated kids movie. The feeling I had watching this movie was the same exact feeling I had watching Transformers: Age of Extinction. The only saving grace is that this movie was shorter, yet it still felt as long as Age of Extinction. Don't believe the critic ratings because this movie is trash. If you have a child though, this movie is definitely for them... but as a rental not a theater experience.
SCORE: 2/10 - Those two points are for Zoe Saldana and Ron Perlman's voice acting.
No comments:
Post a Comment