For naughty kids of all ages, it’s a gas
THIS DREAMWORKS animation is colourful, energetic and fun, even if its reliance on lavatorial humour would bring a blush to the cheeks of the Carry On team.
It is adapted from the bestselling children’s books by Dav Pilkey, about a pair of naughty schoolkids, George (voiced by Kevin Hart) and Harold (Thomas Middleditch), who create the titular superhero, clad only in Y-fronts, for their own comic books.
He exists just in their lively imaginations, at least until Mr Krupp (Ed Helms), their headmaster at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School — a man so horrid that he hates Christmas and kittens and has a sign on his desk reading ‘Hope Dies Here’ — threatens them with the unthinkable punishment of placing them in separate classes. Their response is to hypnotise him and turn him into the preternaturally cheerful and wellmeaning . . . Captain Underpants.
Naturally, for every superhero there must be a supervillain, and in this case it’s the new science teacher, an evil mittel-European boffin whose full name is Professor Pippy P. Diarrheastein Poopypants (I wasn’t kidding when I said this film was lavatorial).
The avowed aim of Professor Poopypants (Nick Kroll) is to rid the world of laughter, to which end he teams up with a humourless classmate of George and Harold’s called Melvin, who, in a rather shameful abdication of political correctness by DreamWorks, is a bespectacled ginger kid.
There are some decent visual jokes, and just about enough smart one-liners to keep grown-ups awake. Alongside them, small children will probably love this film, as long as they’re the sort of small children who think that whoopee cushions are absolutely hilarious.
Which is most of them, I suppose.