Nerds That Geek Movie Review: 'Ratchet & Clank'

​Written by Mike Cervantes

Ratchet and Clank, that wonderful long-running platform-shooter game series from Insomniac, which has graced our Playstation consoles since 2002, dazzling us with amazing e-rated shooter gameplay, smooth as butter 3-D platform controls, and cutscenes possessing quality CG, superior voice-acting, and the overall polish of a well-made animated film. That last element of the series is most likely the reason that this movie was even made and released to theaters. The folks down at Sony and Insomniac have most likely heard the phrase “Pixar-quality cutscenes” in so many video game reviews, they finally decided to bite the bullet and see how well the franchise actually runs on the big screen. Thus we have us Sony’s first entered attempt at feature film franchise-manufacturing: the first animated feature film based on a video game. Y’know, besides Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

In retrospect, the numerous decisions that were then made to actually bring this film to the 3-D appropriated silver screen were regarded as strange by people familiar with the series on Playstation. The animation is 100% handled by Rainmaker, the studio that once brought us the cult TV series Reboot, but has since brought us a dozen lackluster direct-to-video CG cartoons based on random franchises like Inspector Gadget and Popeye. The less initiated video game fanboy would wonder out loud why Insomniac doesn’t just do the animation themselves, but the clear answer to that would be because they were busy creating the video game that ties in with THIS movie.  Still, there are plenty of oddities involved in the production of this film, such as the fact that screenwriter T.J. Fixman, doesn’t want any credit for actually writing the film, given that he’d worked on two other films at the same time, and a great deal of the characters and inspiration came directly from the video games anyhow.   

This all isn’t to say that Ratchet and Clank is a bad film. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. If you want a film to potentially launch a Hollywood trend, it should be a film like this: action-packed, and sincerely funny, with characters and a story that lines up one-to-one with every other film in the animated feature genre. You might even say that Ratchet and Clank waited for just the right time to be released, so it can capitalize on the success of animated action comedies like Big Hero 6. But such a concept doesn’t seem particularly part of Sony’s plan. More likely, Sony had to use this film to fill a gap left behind after the re-shuffling of its animation department, hiring a new president, and subsequently alienating Hotel Transylvania director Gennedy Tartakovsky. Someone in the Sony brass said aloud “We need something campy with cutesy characters all over it by this summer,” and Ratchet and Clank just walked into the boardroom holding a tray loaded with coffee or something…

​But whatever happened to possess the executives, we nonetheless have this film, which does a spotless job translating the Playstation-exclusive characters to the visual medium. So spotless in fact, that there’s nothing that would make this movie any different than say, watching a fan-made video which glues all the video game cutscenes together on YouTube. It is essentially a re-telling of the first game’s story: we meet Ratchet, a garage-mechanic dwelling on a desert planet, ambitious and eager to spout the catchphrase “I can fix that,” like the latter-day Jimmy Neutron that he is. Ratchet gets instantly booted out of an audition for The Barney Stinson-esque Captain Qwark’s Galactic Rangers team for being too small, and the unexpected escape and crash landing of defective war robot Clank’s ship on his planet serves as a convenient excuse for him to insert himself into the center of a galactic war.

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The overly pompous nature of Captain Qwark, a breakout character from the games, and his team of overly macho, shoot-first, gung-ho Galactic Rangers ultimately create the central theme of this film. Every attempt by Ratchet and Clank, along with a few other supporting characters, to solve problems using brains rather than brawn, are constantly thwarted by Qwark and his cronies, to the point where they are almost more detrimental to the heroes than the actual villains: Chairman Drek, an evil middle manager who is destroying planets for real estate agents, and his chief henchman Doctor Nefarious, a character who is known to become Ratchet and Clank’s greatest arch enemy in games, and possibly movies, to come. 

The movie thoroughly and serviceably pays homage to every concept ever introduced in the games, and does so within its 90 minute runtime without ever spoiling the pacing or leaving behind anything that would be misunderstood if you had seen the movie before playing any of the games. They even manage to fit in a montage showcasing all the weapons from the original game, set directly against a montage of Ratchet comedically maiming himself while trying to use them. The remainder of the film is devoted to traveling through space, infiltrating Drek’s red-lighted, robot henchmen riddled bases, discovering the evil chairman’s true plan, and saving the day, all while blowing up hundreds of robots in the process. Once you’re well past the climax of the film, you realize the truly sad difference between watching this as a film and playing it on Playstation: you’re not the one who gets to fire all the guns.

In a way, it is wonderful that this movie translates the overall appeal of the games so well. This movie was out a full three weeks before The Angry Birds Movie, the next bidder for the games-as-animated films genre, just raring to replace the central themes for its game in exchange for fart-jokes and sexual innuendo. We at least have the opportunity to watch a film that appreciates the fact it is derived from a video game, and didn’t try to jazz itself up with all the common conventions of animated feature films. Ratchet, Clank, Captain Qwark, and most of the main cast even have the same voice actors from the video games. There is a small amount of celebrity stunt-casting though. John Goodman is the most obvious celebrity, in the role of Ratchet’s garage boss, Razz, but just try to guess where they hid Paul Giamatti, Bella Thorne, Rosario Dawson, and Sylvester Stallone.

All in all, if you can wrap your head around how strange it is that this film even exists, you’ll have an awesome time watching it. You’ll be glad to know that the bar has been set reasonably high for animated films based on video games, and some far away day, when you see the DVD collecting scratches inside a Dropbox kiosk, you may actually regret failing to watch it in a theater, in 3-D…

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