![]() ![]() There’s even an unscrupulous puppet cheesemonger (Keegan Michael-Key), who seems designed around being denied permission to use the Swedish Chef from The Muppets. One location, the Uncanny Valley, houses outcasts like a viking (Seth Rogen) who epitomizes the glassy, dead-eyed qualities of early CGI. Simmons), is a claymation character who counts a sock puppet among his subordinates. The film goes even farther beyond the traditional animation canon, too. He’s well-acquainted with other convention table fixtures, like Tigra from a C-list Avengers cartoon that ran for only 13 episodes as well as the toothy original CGI design for Sonic the Hedgehog, who is here conceived as an aggressively delusional Tim Robinson character. He’s no longer two-dimensional, having gotten CGI surgery in hopes of fighting the march of time, but the phone is still not ringing with offers. Dale, for example, now gets by entirely on convention appearances that are pretty awkward since he’s best known as part of a duo. Perhaps it’s naive to think they’ll have the same level of control over a Disney production, but on paper, Schaffer and Samberg are exactly the guys for this brand of showbiz comedy.Īnd it’s not that the film lacks good ideas. I have, in the past, enjoyed the work of The Lonely Island, whose fingerprints are on the film through director Akiva Schaffer and star Andy Samberg (their third, Jorma Taccone, only has a voice cameo, but various past collaborators appear throughout.) Their 2016 film Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping remains one of the best comedies of the century, a delightfully weird attack on music industry hubris and celebrity at large. It’s a little tough to pinpoint where exactly we go wrong here. Chip and Dale haven’t spoken since, and the only thing that brings them together is a plea from an old TV co-star, mustachioed Aussie mouse Monterey Jack (Eric Bana), whose debts have caught up with him. The TV show pilot he left to do doesn’t get picked up, either. After a good run, they have a falling-out Dale tries to go solo, and the show gets canned without him. After striking up a partnership and honing their act, they catch a bus to Hollywood and, after a couple of parts as background extras, book that TV show you’ve heard about. When the pair first meet, they do so in a (co-format? co-medium?) school attended by regular human kids as well as assorted ‘toons. This is, in other words, a riff on the 1988 classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit, another mystery-comedy about how cartoon characters behave behind the scenes. They’re still tiny cartoon chipmunks, but they live in a world where cartoons are a living, breathing(?) part of society. Their squeaky voices were part of their act, and in reality they just sound like John Mulaney and Andy Samberg, respectively. It also gets the Chippendales reference out of the way up front. That’s before I was born, but the series played so reliably in reruns that I still ended up familiar with the theme song, and you’d better believe this is the sort of movie where a character sings their own theme song. ![]() But the hook here is in its catering to nostalgia, taking as part of its continuity a TV show that ran for 3 seasons from 1989 to 1990. It moves quickly enough to hold onto short attention spans through regular explosions of color, noise, and funny voices. That’s the thing, though: grown-ass adults who spend too much time on the internet are absolutely the target audience for this movie. (“Grown-ass” already maybe exceeds the saltiness threshold for the film’s language, though one of the chipmunks does remark that he’s in hell.) It is, presumably, designed for an audience quite separate from a grown-ass adult who spends too much time on the internet. Does it really matter if I dislike Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers? I found it empty and pandering, an instance of some typically reliable comedians on autopilot, but is it even for me? It’s a PG-rated movie that got dumped on Disney+, that comes with a supplemental list of what it references which you can also stream on Disney+. ![]()
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