After 15 post-
Shrek years—since CGI feature animation was offered a vision of the most obvious possible path towards a license to print money—we now have this dispiriting nonsense based on the popular smartphone game. Set on an island populated by flightless birds, it pits short-fused Red (Jason Sudeikis) and his pals (Josh Gad and Danny McBride) against a group of pigs (led by Bill Hader) who show up with possibly nefarious motives. A bunch of frantic action ultimately ensues, in order to provide all of the touchstones that players of the game would recognize, all built around that most over-used of animated-feature plots, the “Rudolph”: Ostracized outsider goes on a quest and finds that his defining trait can help save the day. And of course it’s seasoned with pop-culture gags—the pigs have a poster from the musical
Ham-ilton; pause to allow your knees to recover from the slapping—rather than humor built from character, because that would require effort. Oh, and it ends with a musical production number, just in case you were worried you might miss anything that wasn’t pre-ordained from the start of this century.
By
Scott Renshaw