Arctic adventure revisits Zootopia
Arctic Justice (G, 92 mins) Directed by Aaron Woodley Reviewed by James Croot ★★★
Despite his ability to blend in, Swifty (Jeremy Renner) has always wanted to stand out. Boasting ambitions bigger than his small, remote town of Taigasville, the arctic fox dreams of joining local celebrities Duke, Dakota and Dusty as part of the Top Dog Delivery service.
But while he manages to secure a junior employee role in the mailroom, any hopes of further promotion seem almost impossible, especially given that he can barely move a delivery sled.
However, desperate to impress his recently returned childhood friend Jade (Heidi Klum), he takes it upon himself to personally deliver a vital package for her.
Having to endure a terrible snowstorm, he winds up at the door of Otto Von Walrus (John Cleese), whose shifty behaviour and army of puffins put Swifty on edge.
Those concerns are only heightened when Duke, Dakota and Dusty disappear, leaving Swifty as the only one who can keep up Taigasville’s link to the outside world.
Although it sports a heavyweight vocal cast that also includes James Franco, Alec Baldwin, Anjelica Huston and French actor Omar Sy, Arctic Justice looks and feels like a class below the output of DreamWorks, Disney or Pixar.
Canadian director Aaron Woodley’s (who is also one of five writers) tale boasts some slick visuals and engaging knockabout action, but the plot itself feels like a cobbled-together hybrid of Zootopia and Despicable Me.
It also has some unfortunate similarities to the recent Angry
Birds sequel. Cleese’s nefarious marine mammal is simply Despicable’s Gru in another guise (although he also reminded me of Danger Mouse’s Baron Silas Greenback), and a world populated by a fox engineer, a Russian caribou, Italian beavers and French otters evokes memories of Judy Hopps, Nick Wilde and the rest of Zootopia’s residents.
Then there’s the heavy-handed, hamfisted peddling of the movie’s politics. While it’s nice to see a kids’ film deal with climate change – and here it pervades every frame – it’s seemingly dismissed as the work of one bad apple intent on fracking the planet as revenge for having his scientific ideas ignored.
The dialogue also bangs on relentlessly about not putting on a false front for people, something that culminates in what surely must be the clunkiest closing line in animated voiceover history: ‘‘It’s about making the world a better place – and being yourself along the way.’’
A fun, but forgettable animated adventure.