Bad Dog: THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS

The animators at Illumination Entertainment have taken a break from their anarchic Minions to show us The Secret Life of Pets. It’s a far more conventional and predictable kids’ movie, operating from the shameless question, “What if Toy Story, but with pets?” It wouldn’t surprise me if writers Cinco Paul, Ken Daurio, and Brian Lynch had a plaque over their desks saying, “What would Pixar do?” Their movie is about an overconfident little guy who feels threatened when his owner brings home a new buddy. Feelings of jealousy lead him to try to get rid of this intruder and return to being the leading recipient of his owner’s affections. Unfortunately, his attempts to do so leave him lost far from home, with only his new nemesis for company. A group of pals left behind try to figure out how to save these two, while a group of misfits the mismatched pair encounter on their journey home start out menacing before revealing themselves as cuddly help. Along the way there’s a dollop of sentimental backstory and by the end there’s a big scrambling chase after a truck. Sounds familiar?

There was barely a moment of this movie where I wasn’t reminded of Toy Story, except for the climax, which has a little more in common with the end of Finding Dory. Chalk that up to bad timing more than copying, I suppose. The problem with playing the Pixar formula – especially when the originators themselves are reaching the limits of its potential – is that Illumination is no Pixar. They’re trying to be something they aren’t. They have nothing of their inspiration’s deep thought-through approach to imagined worlds and none of the cleverness of premise. Pets is a pretty easy and lazy display of the simplest possible imagination. There’s a secret society of pets under their owner’s noses, a reasonable enough picture-book assumption. What does that entail? Well, in this New York City apartment building it means the animals roam the halls and end up partying and hanging out together all day before the people return at night. They play it safe, content with their lot in life. There’s no great community built up, just a bunch of animals sitting around.

The lead dog is Max (Louis C.K.). He’s jealous of a big new dog (Eric Stonestreet) his owner (Ellie Kemper) brings home. Their neighbors include a fluffy white dog (Jenny Slate), a surly cat (Lake Bell), two more dogs (Hannibal Buress and Bobby Moynihan), and a falcon (Albert Brooks). I’d tell you more about who these characters are, but they’re not much. Relying entirely on what little personality the famous voices can filter through, they’re bouncy bright cartoony critters with little in the way of interior lives and only the simplest one-note motivations. It’d be fine if there weren’t so little else to pay attention to. The movie’s best creation is a sewer gang of discarded animals who call themselves The Flushed Pets and plot to hurt humans. A rough bunny voiced by Kevin Hart leads them. Unfortunately the rigidly deterministic message of the movie softens them – after a lengthy bus crash sequence in which surely several people die – saying all counterculture revolutionaries secretly want to learn their proper place in the world and be happy with that. It’s nothing if not a settling-for-the-status-quo downer.

At least co-directors Chris Renaud and Yarrow Cheney keep the look colorful and cuddly, and the voice work does sell a funny line here and there. It’s best in an early sequence setting up the daily routine of pets. This gives the chance for animators to get funny gags out of their characters identifiable animals behaviors next to anthropomorphized emotions. Max whines about his owner leaving only to snap into a tail-wagging leap when he hears the click of a door. That’s nice. Later, though, the movie grinds through predictable paces, scurrying here and there, engaging in predictable pratfalls, cartoon violence and vertigo, and growing thinner all the while. It’s best when unexpected, like a hallucinogenic hunger dream in which hot dogs sing “We Go Together.” Moments like that are rare. It feels mechanical and routine. Ho-hum, just another technically competent computer animated comedy with celebrity voices on an adventure learning to appreciate what they have and whatnot. It’s programmed to hit the right beats, but not for intelligence or heart. At least it’s watchable and not downright hateful like The Angry Birds Movie. It’s just mindless. Why have such low expectations for what’s going in kid’s minds?

Foul: THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE

Remember Angry Birds? It was that game you might've played on your phone for a couple months six years ago? Well, now there’s a CGI animated movie from Sony to answer the not-so-pressing questions of who are those birds and why are they so angry? If you recall the game involved flinging bird projectiles from a giant slingshot to smash into pigs who stole their eggs, I think you can piece the answers together. The filmmakers behind such a crass commercial project as The Angry Birds Movie haven’t done much to elaborate on the game’s basic premise. They’re content to just graft on plot points we’ve seen in lots of other cartoons. There’s an outcast who needs to double down on being himself to save the day and win his community’s acceptance. A hero appears to die in the final explosion, but grief is interrupted by the reveal that – surprise! – he survived. Endless colloquial patter and second-hand cultural references from celebrity voices load up the dialogue. And then it all ends in a dance party. But, you know, name recognition counts for a lot, I suppose.

The movie is about Red (Jason Sudeikis), a mean, grumpy, misanthropic jerk of a bird, a walking bad mood who grumbles about everything and makes fun of everyone. He has no patience either, and is quick to take offense. He’s an Internet comment, or maybe a Twitter egg. He’s one angry bird on a peaceful island of stubby flightless feathery lumps you’ll recognize from the game. They don’t like him, so the feeling’s mutual. They want to send him to anger management courses, but of course that doesn’t work because Red needs to be able to channel his negative emotions into teaching the birds to fight back after they’ve been tricked by a bunch of pigs (led by Bill Hader) into welcoming porcine strangers into their homes and end up having their eggs stolen. The meek flock, full of distinctive comedians’ voices there to distract the parents (Danny McBride, Josh Gad, Maya Rudolph, Keegan-Michael Key, Kate McKinnon, Tony Hale, Hannibal Buress, and others), needs to become Angry Birds of a feather.

Writer Jon Vitti, who apparently brings none of his smarter comedy experience working on Saturday Night Live, The Larry Sanders Show, The Office, and more to his family friendly scripts (like this, and The Squeakquel), spends an awful lot of time getting to this point, most of the runtime in fact. Why a movie based on a game everyone knows would feel the need to lay so much track for its preposterously simple concept is beyond me. Is there any viewer who won’t know what’s about to happen? Eventually, the birds fling themselves into Pig Land and destroy everything in sight with the help of an uncouth, lazy bald eagle. So it’s just your average everyday colorfully dumb kids’ movie about righteous anger as an asset, territorial xenophobia as the only alternative to gullibility, and the need for a red-faced strongman to lead our heroes in excusable genocide. You know, the old someone-does-wrong-to-you-so-burn-your-enemies-to-the-ground family film moral. Yikes.

Only coming alive in spurts in the climax, when the movie manages to make a direct translation of gameplay into something like action and movement, the whole thing is otherwise agonizingly static and manic, birds standing around trading bad quips and engaging in tame, unimaginative animated antics. It’s also the dirtiest kids’ movie in ages, with wiggling cartoon butts, jokes about poop and pee, and all sorts of barely veiled entendres like a disgruntled bird chirping, “pluck my life,” a bird with a large brood asked if she’s ever heard of “using bird control,” and a pig’s bookcase with “Fifty Shades of Green” open. All that and more too isn’t funny, and rarely works on a child’s level. And what would a 7-year-old make of a Shining reference? Or a pig named Jon Hamm? These are moments for literally no one.

It’s just dire garbage, empty-headed and utterly worthless. There’s not a single spark of imagination to be found in the soulless, vacant frames, putting who knows how many man-hours of talented animation work to waste. Not a story so much as feature length product integration – not just to move apps, but also a Blake Shelton single (played twice), and whatever toys you can find in your local shops and Happy Meals – it can’t even be bothered to think up memorable characters, noteworthy slapstick, or even one good catchphrase. (Have we fallen so far that a movie as dumb and pointless as this can’t even choke up one annoying line for kids to repeat on the way out of the theater?) I found the movie agonizingly slow and tediously uninspired, somehow not only less fun and entertaining, but also significantly less smart than the simplistic game. Mind-numbingly predictable and carelessly cruel, the whole thing is so thoughtless and witless the world feels like a worse place for having it.

The Boys Next Door: NEIGHBORS

An R-rated comedy can sour quickly. There’s a tendency among Hollywood’s purveyors of that subgenre to rush to the R and forget the comedy when planning their edgiest jokes or letting the actors endlessly riff on the lines until scenes grow baggy and dirty. The surprise of Nicholas Stoller’s Neighbors is that it gets the balance mostly right. You’d think a movie about a married couple and their newborn daughter who find their lovely suburban college-town lives disrupted by a rowdy fraternity moving in next door would lend itself to lazy stereotypes and general degeneracy. It does, but even though the movie is exuberantly vulgar, broad, and loud, it never loses track of the human qualities in its characters. There’s an allowance for some small nuance that avoids reducing the characters to their cheapest, ugliest selves.

We start with the married couple (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) trying to adjust to life as parents. Unlike Rogen’s many man-child roles, this is a movie about two adults who are mostly happy to have matured to the extent they have. With movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five Year Engagement, director Stoller has proven himself interested in exploring the emotional shifts the continual process of growing as an adult entails. In his films, the relationships ring true and are treated with a degree of weight. Here our leads are doting on and toting around their adorable baby, enjoying life while still wondering if having a child has to mean leaving their carefree party days behind. Just as they’re figuring out their new, more responsible, fully adult selves, an explosion of youthful id moves in next door.

At first it doesn’t seem so bad. The frat’s president (Zac Efron) promises they’ll keep the noise down. The other boys (Dave Franco, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jerrod Carmichael, Craig Roberts) seem nice enough, cooing over the baby and saying they want to keep the neighborhood pleasant. But then the partying starts. It’s loud, long, and debauched, just as you’d expect. And soon the couple is forced to call in a noise complaint. When the responding cop (Hannibal Buress) tells the frat the source of the call, the frat takes it up a notch. They aren’t just loud and obnoxious partiers by night, litterers and loiterers by day. (That’s familiar to anyone who has lived in a college town.) They’re now actively antagonistic, pranking their neighbors in escalatingly dangerous and improbable ways. After a visit to the flighty dean (Lisa Kudrow) proves unhelpful, the couple decides to sabotage the frat and shut them down for good. The script by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien follows a clear structure, with the frat behaving boorishly and the couple plotting ways to force them out.

With such a setup, it’d be easy for the movie to fall into characterization as simple and button-pushing as its preoccupation with bodily functions, body parts, and bodily harm. A lesser comedy would make the frat boys only villains and the thirtysomethings only virtuous. Here the terrible frat boys are, between raunch and bullying, allowed moments of surprising tenderness, self-doubt, and worry about their fast-approaching post-graduation prospects. One guy goes to a job fair where he’s told flat out he’s “too dumb.” Later, one frat kid earnestly tells another, “You don’t like them [the neighbors] because they remind you of the future.” As for those neighbors, they like smoking a little weed now and then, want to keep their sex life interesting, and have real doubts about the suburban bliss they feel pressure to want. These unexpected shadings go a long way towards balancing the broader, dumber moments.

Some of the situations are unlikely. (Wouldn’t the couple at least close their curtains at night?) Slapstick – like a violent and far-fetched airbags prank – and gross-out gags – like a breastfeeding emergency or, worse, a mix-up involving a discarded, unused prophylactic – might go too far. But the film remains largely likable because it has the right balance. Cinematographer Brandon Trost (who also worked on the better-looking-than-you’d-think This is the End) shoots with a slick, loosely held style that gives weight and a degree of realism to the proceedings. Maybe that’s why the more exaggerated moments feel a bit false, but it also helps sell the truth in the solid performances. Rogen and Byrne have warm chemistry and easy repartee. I particularly liked them arguing about who gets to be the irresponsible Kevin James-type in their marriage. Around them the ensemble – from Efron and Franco on down – is well-cast and well-deployed. And the baby is adorable, ready to give cute cutaway reaction shots while being kept nice and safe, sleeping peacefully when the most dangerous moments erupt.

Too often movies about frats want to wink, nudge, and enjoy the sexism, racism, carousing, and homophobic hazing, wallowing in celebratory immaturity. It’s good, then, that Neighbors finds itself squarely on the side of growing up, saying to do so means finding the proper balance between partying and responsibility. It likes its characters, even when they make mistakes, even at their most caricatured and stereotypical. It’s not a great comedy, a little low on laughs, but it’s pleasant enough to be a decent time at the movies. Without a mean spirit and with a relatively short runtime of 90 minutes and change, it’s the rare R-rated comedy that accommodates dirty jokes, bad behavior, and even a few unfunny scenes, without going sour.