Angry Birds
Directed by: Clay Kaytis & Fergal Reilly
Written by: Jon Vitti
Voices by: Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Bill Hader, Peter Dinklage, Sean Penn, Keegan-Michael Key, Kate McKinnon, Tony Hale, Hannibal Buress, Ike Barinholtz, Tituss Burgess
Animation/Action/Comedy - 97 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 18 May 2016
Written by: Jon Vitti
Voices by: Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Bill Hader, Peter Dinklage, Sean Penn, Keegan-Michael Key, Kate McKinnon, Tony Hale, Hannibal Buress, Ike Barinholtz, Tituss Burgess
Animation/Action/Comedy - 97 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 18 May 2016
Movies based on video games are a dime a dozen nowadays but say hello to the first movie based on a smartphone app. Just you wait for Facebook: The Like Strikes Back and Google Maps Goes to College. You can argue there are screenplays out there based on even more vapid source material, but for at least the near future, Angry Birds has a firm foothold in the conversation. I have never played Angry Birds before but I hear it’s quite the way to spend an airplane ride. For those of us in the uninitiated masses, there are some inside jokes that whiff over our heads but I knew exactly where they were because the audience would make a collective, “Ah!”
Red (Jason Sudeikis, Race) does what we would all like to do when we get angry. He lets loose with a tirade of sarcastic invective, yet I am sure he just calls it honesty. Red, perhaps correctly, realizes he is a wise man amongst fools, but to his bird brethren on Bird Island, he is a contrarian black sheep. Hauled into bird court for an egg-related offense, Judge Peckinpah (Keegan-Michael Key, Keanu), sentences Red to the island’s most severe punishment, anger management.
Red (Jason Sudeikis, Race) does what we would all like to do when we get angry. He lets loose with a tirade of sarcastic invective, yet I am sure he just calls it honesty. Red, perhaps correctly, realizes he is a wise man amongst fools, but to his bird brethren on Bird Island, he is a contrarian black sheep. Hauled into bird court for an egg-related offense, Judge Peckinpah (Keegan-Michael Key, Keanu), sentences Red to the island’s most severe punishment, anger management.
Veering into Adam Sandler territory, Red stiff-arms any actual calming techniques and uses his class time to mock his classmates. These other anger managers will naturally form Red’s clique throughout the film and fall in line as supporting heroes when the time comes. There is tiny, yellow Chuck (Josh Gad, Pixels) who does everything at a million miles an hour; this is one hyperactive bird as his mouth cannot keep up with his mind. Bomb (Danny McBride, This Is the End) is perhaps the film’s most inexplicable character because all he does is explode munition-like in a room when embarrassed or something and only gets reactive lines; no jokes for Bomb.
Sudeikis likens Red’s presence in the group to Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He feels like an outsider in a world which does not understand him, but unlike Cuckoo’s Nest, it is only these outsiders who can save the island. Angry Birds is an origin story between the birds and the pigs which I have no doubt all those gamers were wondering about while sling-shotting birds on their phones; just how did these birds and pigs come to be at war?
Whatever their motivations for making something as deep as Angry Birds, the producers went out and hired a guy with the right pedigree to write it, Jon Vitti, a veteran of a couple dozen Simpsons and King of the Hill episodes. There are a good handful of effective one-liners sprinkled throughout this mess and you can almost hear the sarcastic returns of Bart Simpson coming out of Red. Vitti wrote a predictable underdog story full of lessons in friendship and a dash of adventure, but come on man, you wrote a movie about a smartphone app.
First time directors Fergal Reilly and Clay Kaytis come from animation backgrounds. Reilly is a storyboard artist from films like Iron Giant and Spider-Man 2 and Clay Kaytis is an animator from the Disney school including 2D animation from Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame all the way to the 3D computer wizardry from Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen. Hiring artists was also a good move and there is plenty of humorous detail to notice within the film’s design, but even though Reilly and Kaytis arrive with healthy resumes, there is nothing particularly noteworthy to look at here.
Red is a misfit outcast stuck on island full of folks pairing off, falling in love, and making eggs. There is an overt undertone suggesting Red is unhappy and borderline violent because he is lonely; you get the feeling if a sequel drops on us it will feature a volatile love interest. The voice actors are all very well known names including several SNL alumni, but seriously folks, this movie is for your kids who probably are not playing Angry Birds anymore. It’s better than recent video game junk like Ratchet & Clank, but it’s a far cry from palatable.
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