There’s no buzz in this limp Lightyear
PIXAR’S Toy Story spin-off Lightyear (★★III, PG, 100 mins) is a huge disappointment, not because it isn’t brilliantly animated — it is — but because it contains only a fraction of the inventiveness and joy of the films that spawned it.
It is billed as space ranger Buzz Lightyear’s origin story, the conceit being that it’s the very movie that made Andy, the kid in the original Toy Story (1995), fall in love with his model Buzz.
But without the context of the toybox and Buzz’s chums Woody and co, this becomes a workaday space adventure about Buzz and his crew trying to escape a hostile planet.
There is an LBGTQ storyline that has earned Lightyear a ban in certain Muslim countries, but otherwise it’s hard to think of anything that makes this film anywhere near as distinctive as its illustrious forebears. It’s not bad, but as I explained in a longer review in Tuesday’s paper, expectations that ran to infinity and beyond, if not even farther, are quickly dampened.
■ CHA Cha real Smooth (★★★★I, 15, 107 mins), by welcome contrast, is a delight. Its writer, director and leading man is Cooper Raiff, a rising star of independent cinema, whose 2020 debut, Freshman Year, I also loved.
This movie has a similar rite-of-passage vibe. Raiff plays Andrew, who, though charming, kind, witty and charismatic, is stuck in a dead-end job in a New Jersey fast-food joint and is a source of great concern to his manic-depressive mother (Leslie Mann).
But after he gets the dancing going at a bat mitzvah do, the smitten Jewish mums encourage him to become a professional ‘party-starter’. Meanwhile, Andrew befriends the lovely Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her autistic daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), and the film explores his evolving relationship with them, and with his own family, against the backdrop of his party-starting misadventures.
It’s funny, sweet and romantic, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
■ I CAN’T honestly say the same about Spiderhead (★★III, no cert, 106 mins), a psychological thriller set in the near future about prison inmates being given mind-altering drugs. The director is Joseph Kosinski, who just brought us the worldwide hit Top Gun: Maverick, and it stars Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller. So there’s plenty of talent involved, but the dystopian plot rather runs out of puff.
■ LIGHTYEAR is in cinemas. Cha Cha real Smooth is on Apple tV+ and Spiderhead is on Netflix.