SCI-FI COMEDY A CARTOON DUD
Ratchet & Clank lacks a lot of lustre
Pop culture is an omnivorous snake with an appetite for snakes. How else to explain Ratchet & Clank, the new platformer-shooter video game based on Ratchet & Clank, the new computer-animated kids’ film based on Ratchet & Clank, the PlayStation game from 2002? (For a more detailed analysis, check out my podcast, also called Ratchet & Clank.)
The film tells a basic origin story. Ratchet (James Arnold Taylor, who also provides the voice in the game) is a furry mechanic on a desert planet that looks suspiciously like it’s in the Star Wars galaxy, a common theme in this film’s locations.
Ratchet longs to join a group of galactic guardians who, due to copyright reasons, are not called the guardians of the galaxy.
Their leader is Captain Qwark (Jim Ward), combining the brawn of Mr. Incredible with the brains of Buzz Lightyear on a low-battery day.
Ratchet is turned away at first, but then joins forces with a plucky robot named Clank — picture The Iron Giant but much, much smaller — to help defeat an alien attack on Qwark & Co.
This leads to him being accepted into the group, which must then prepare for an even bigger assault.
There are bad guys aplenty, including the robotic Victor Von Ion (Sylvester Stallone), Dr. Nefarious (Armin Shimerman) and Paul Giamatti as the voice of Chairman Drek, whose Drek Industries is not only plotting to take over the galaxy, but may in fact have had a hand in making this dreck. (Fun fact: Dr. Nefarious was originally a good guy, until he looked up “nefarious” in the dictionary.)
The film is barely watchable, particularly if you don’t mind being told how very watchable it is. I lost track of the number of times characters declared something “great,” “sweet,” “awesome” or “wicked.”
It provides a lot of noise without much in the way of sense.
We never really find out why Clank is the one non-evil robot, for instance.
And if I have to play a video game to find out, I’d rather remain in the dark. The visuals are similarly passable but uninspired.
In addition to the generic science-fiction backgrounds, the characters all look to have been sculpted from the same brightly coloured dough.
They have bounce but not much personality: It’s the Megan Fox of animation.
We live in a golden age of animation, with films including Inside Out, The Little Prince, Shaun the Sheep Movie and Big Hero 6 unspooling on screens. But that doesn’t mean everything out there is 24-karat.
There are cartoon duds like Hoodwinked Too, Legends of Oz, Strange Magic and Free Birds. Ratchet & Clank has a similar iron-pyrite sheen.