BEFORE: Daniel Adegboyega carries over from "The Gunman", and it's another one of those situations where I'm absolutely sure I'm the only person who followed up THAT movie with THIS movie, because, why would you? I'm the freak.
It'll be mostly kiddie movies this week, except for "The Gunman" and, well, one other because I couldn't keep that theme going for the whole week, I had to drop in a murder mystery to make the other films connect.
THE PLOT: A chaotic battle ensues between Jerry Mouse, who has taken refuge in the Royal Gate Hotel, and Tom Cat, who is hired to drive him away before the day of a big wedding arrives.
AFTER: God, there are SO many things wrong with this movie. First off, that it got made in the first place, when nobody was even ASKING for an updated version of Tom & Jerry, or a reboot, or whatever this is. And certainly nobody wanted a movie that was half-cartoon and half live-action, because how would that even WORK? This depicts some kind of alternate Earth where all the animals are cartoons? What? So, on this planet man descended from cartoon apes? It doesn't look right, it doesn't FEEL right, and worse, it creates this weird disconnect in your brain, watching humans interact with cartoon animals, when that's just not possible IRL. It worked (sort of) in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" but those toons were TOONS, they weren't considered real animals, and every character, toon or human, was aware that the toons were toons and the humans were not. But otherwise, there's a reason why nobody's really attempted a cartoon/live-action hybrid since then - it's just too weird. Wait, they did another "Space Jam", didn't they? It looked like it sucked, too.
I sort of get why they did it, if they cast these actors to just do voices in an all-cel or all-CGI cartoon, you'd never recognize their voices. OK, so great, I recognize Colin Jost and Chloe Grace Moretz, and they're playing people, but people interacting with cartoon animals, as if nothing is odd about that at all. That BY ITSELF is very odd. But since we all that know Tom & Jerry look like cel-animated animals, they couldn't change that, or we wouldn't recognize them as the characters from our childhoods, so we end up with this weird hybrid film, and that ends up causing more problems than it solves.
Actually, the whole film is like that, it spent twelve years in development hell, and that means probably dozens of writers tried to put some kind of coherent plot together, and what ended up on the screen is pure nonsense. You can't write a film by committee, and I bet there were hundreds of story meetings for this film over the years, everybody trying to put in their two cents and make the film better, but "too many cooks", as they say. So they ended up with this movie that fires off in every direction at once, and there's no coherent over-arching plot - instead the movie lurches forward in fits and starts, then has to go back and explain every little thing, and then it's plot complication on top of plot complication, then chase scene and END IT. It was absolutely agonizing for me to get through this.
Take the two celebrities (?) getting married at the hotel - they need to break up at some point and call the wedding off, just to give the other characters something to "fix", something that will unite everybody on the same project, and also lead to a wrap-up in the last act. But they can't show a couple having real terrible couple problems, like he cheated on her, or she's secretly a man, nothing like that, because it's a kids movie. So the big "problem" is that he doesn't listen to her enough, and they both sort of forgot how to argue, so each one just goes with whatever the other one wants, and it leads to a wedding that's too big, with cartoon elephants and a cartoon tiger, and a big fight between all of the animals. Which is entirely wrong because they stated in the beginning of the film that the hotel doesn't allow pets or animals, and then of course they immediately break that rule for the celebrities' cat and dog, then for Tom, so he can catch Jerry. So, umm, if you're going to break this rule of the hotel 10 times during the film, why have it in the first place?
Similarly, Jerry takes up residence at the hotel - makes sense, it seems like a nice place to live, and within 10 minutes of screen time, he's nicked everything he needs to furnish a nice little space for himself in the radiator (?). Where it is, is pretty unclear - but somehow he has his own little mouse-sized hotel door in the hall, which doesn't make any sense, either. What mouse-hole, even in a cartoon, has a DOOR? If he took over a space in a radiator, that wouldn't be anywhere in the wall adjacent to the hallway. Am I overthinking this, or does nothing in this film follow any sense of logic?
They fall back so many times on the "cats chase mice" and "dogs chase cats" trope, which has been done to DEATH in cartoons, but then they also have to explain this animal relationship every, single, time, too. Give me a break! It seems like maybe they really wanted to respect some of the old cartoon traditions from the 1940's and 1950's, but then they couldn't quite manage to get them right. They pull the angel/devil thing with Tom, you know, when he's got an angelic version of himself on one shoulder, and a devilish version of himself on the other, and he can't quite decide whether to be good or evil? The tradition is that this bit is supposed to end with the devil defeating the angel, or maybe vice versa, but here it ends with a subway car running over both the angel AND the devil. Huh? That's just not how it's supposed to work.
The best thing about this film is the elaborate "Rube Goldberg" type machine that Tom invents and builds to catch Jerry in a cage - I had to slow it down and watch it a few times to really appreciate it, it's a thing of genius. But then the worst thing about this film is that one character has to walk Spike the bulldog and apparently he takes very large, stinky poops. WHY? This was never a part of any cartoon before, not ever. Cartoon animals don't poop, because we don't want to think about that when we're watching a cartoon! Maybe they did a bit on this somewhere in "The Secret Life of Pets", but it wasn't this blatant, or this disgusting. I bet nobody pooped in "Zootopia" or "The Bad Guys" or any Disney film ever.
And come on, the hotel is known for it's gorgeous, elaborately fragile glass atrium? Gee, I wonder if some characters are going to break all those windows at some point in the story. YA THINK? So many other terrible decisions here, like Tom & Jerry catch a fly ball at a Yankees game, or Tom rides between subway cars (illegal, and sets a bad example for the kids), or Tom has to pretend to eat Jerry in front of the street cats, or they will eat him themselves. Even when the story does manage to lurch forward, it can't help but do that in the most clunky way possible.
And having the main character steal someone else's resume and present it as her own to get a job at the hotel. That would never work, plus it HAS to be illegal, and also sets a terrible example for the kids, because she succeeds after doing that, and so the karmic balance is off, she needs to get punished for her actions, even more than she does. The fussy chef character played by Ken Jeong also feels incomplete, like his story is only half-written. Is he a good chef, a bad chef, a crazy chef, a chef with OCD? Not that it matters, but I'd like to know WHY he does what he does to the wedding cake, like everything else in the whole film, it's pathetically unclear.
The worst news is that this film actually made some money, so that means there may be another one on the way, and we can anticipate more very awkward conversations between characters, such as, "Hey, so, if someone were to lose something valuable, and somebody else wanted to try and find that thing, how would they maybe go about doing that?" Is that a serious question? An adult human somehow doesn't know that when something gets lost, they should maybe LOOK FOR IT?
NITPICK POINT: One of many, MANY things this film got wrong about New York City, but somehow this one stands out - down at the Fulton Fish Market in NYC, they do NOT throw fish from vendor to vendor. That's only in Seattle at the Pike Place Fish Market. It's just because they have their fish scales in a very inconvenient place, and I guess they can't be moved closer to where they need to be. Now it's a tradition in Seattle, but nowhere else, sorry.
Also starring Chloe Grace Moretz (last heard in "The Addams Family"), Michael Peña (last seen in "CHIPS"), Rob Delaney (last heard in "Ron's Gone Wrong"), Jordan Bolger, Patsy Ferran (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), Pallavi Sharda (last seen in "Lion"), Colin Jost (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "My Spy"), Somi De Souza, Ajay Chhabra, Patrick Poletti (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Natinon"), Janis Ahern (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Camilla Arfwedson (last seen in "The Duchess"), Joe Bone (last seen in "Six Minutes to Midnight"), Edward Judge, Christina Chong (last seen in "W.E."), Edward Dogliani, Ozuna, with cameos from Joe Buck, Chris Wilson (also carrying over from "The Gunman"), archive footage of Gene Wilder
and the voices of Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Shall We Dance?"), Nicky Jam (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), Joey Wells, Harry Ratchford, Will "Spank" Horton, Na'im Lynn, Lil Rel Howery (last seen in "Fatherhood"), Utkarsh Ambudkar (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Tim Story, T-Pain (last seen in "The Boss"), Mel Blanc, June Foray, William Hanna.
RATING: 3 out of 10 dinosaur bones
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