Nerds That Geek Movie Review: "The Angry Birds Movie"

Written by Mike Cervantes

I admit I had low expectations coming into this film. The trailers pretty much gave to me the impression that this film was going to be a solid one on the “Good to Madagascar” animated film scale. That is, we’ve been in a climate of CG animated features coming out of every single studio for about a decade now, and while there are some truly lovely, thought provoking, intelligent animated films with appeal for all ages; there are just as many that, like the 2005 Dreamworks film Madagascar, are filled wall to wall with potty-humor and the dirty ad-libs of its entirely adult-comedian based voice cast. It is important for me to, above all else, emphasize the fact that The Angry Birds Movie is did absolutely nothing to raise my opinion of it in the entirety of its 90-minute runtime, which is a shame, because of all the things this film was meant to stand for.

I didn’t realize until the lights went down in the movie theater that this film was developed by Sony Imageworks Animation, one branch of the multi-tentacled beast that Sony Pictures Animation has become after the massive resource re-shuffling it had post-Hotel Transylvania 2. Sony had the earlier release of Ratchet and Clank at the beginning of this month, which I’ve already reviewed. I noted that film was completely outsourced to Canada’s Rainmaker Entertainment, while The Angry Birds Movie was actually developed by an internal Sony studio, effectively “putting all their eggs in one basket,” when it comes to hoping which of these two films was going to succeed at the box office. There was some definite risk involved, as it has been reported that Finnish mobile games developer Rovio had put forward $73 million, practically the entirety of its current corporate bankroll, in hopes that this film will be a success.

Eventually, Rovio is going to get what it wants. This movie is going to end up a success, but when you compare its success to the release of Ratchet and Clank, which is now reporting a $10 million loss at the box office, its only crime being that it was too terribly close to the video game it is based on. We can now look forward to seeing a future of video-game based animated features that will “copy” the success of The Angry Birds Movie.

Which is very, very, bad, because this film…is very, VERY, bad.

You can pretty much scrape together the overall plot from the trailers which have already been released: Jason Sudekis plays Red, the only Type-A personality dwelling on a small island populated by birds deeply ensconced in the cult of positivity. After a very slapstick incident involving a party clown, an agitated father figure, and a premature egg-breaking, Red is ordered into an anger management class populated by the other stars of the video game: Matilda (Maya Rudolph), Chuck (Josh Gad), Bomb, (Danny McBride) and Terence. (Sean Penn, an actor wasted by having the character only growl.) Red becomes the lone savior of the flock as he’s the only one not to trust the approach of a colonizing pig named Leonard (Bill Hader) who predictably distracts the happier birds until he can find a moment to steal all of their eggs. 

I can speak about these characters with a certain amount of familiarity. Rovio had once gone far and away to make sure Angry Birds is always on our mind in its heyday, at one point producing hundreds of its own animated shorts, which you may now find streaming on Netflix. Those 2-D flash shorts were subtle and charming, with emphasis on the Angry Birds never speaking a word in order to create international appeal along the lines of Tom and Jerry. 

---

The exact opposite approach is taken in this movie, with every single character having their personality magnified to the point of hideousness. The film certainly suggests that you should be on Red’s side, but he’s simply too antagonistic in order to be a relatable good-guy. Chuck is the campy sort-of gay stereotype that you should never see in any sort of modern film, let alone one that’s rated PG. The high note of his played-for-laughs orientation emerges when he has a leather-daddy fantasy about the legendary Mighty Eagle, (Peter Dinklage) who in turn is revealed to be a self-obsessed fraud played well past his prime.

So, it ends up being up to the birds to chase the pigs to the island and blah, blah, blah. The last thing you can expect in this movie is a subversion of the paper-thin plot that served the original games. It’s too busy showing pigs in ass-less chaps, mother birds vomiting into their kids’ lunch bags, and multiple instances of characters getting bashed in the groin. That 11 minute sequence of Mighty Eagle taking an 11-second piss that so gleefully punctuated the trailers is made just a wee bit longer and a wee bit more uncomfortable.

When the vulgar sight-gags aren’t assaulting your eyes, the dialogue is doing the same to your ears, as though the writers were trying to win a bet as to how much profanity one can get away with in a PG-rated film. The word “flock” is used as a stand-in for another familiar “F” word. The movie tries to play off its potty-mouth by juxtaposing the lines with funny dialogue, but it only comes off more Family Guy, than genuinely charming. Red leads a charge against the pigs by shouting “All-right everyone, drop your nuts and grab your butts!” Cut to a bird spitting out a mouthful of walnuts. Again, this film is rated PG.

It’s a real shame that this is the film’s overall repertoire, because you really do see some glimmers of its overall potential. As a Sony pictures film with the pedigree of Hotel Transylvania, the characters are well designed, the expressions are wonderful, the CG is lovely, and the slapstick is well timed and occasionally amusing. The movie makes it hard to appreciate even its technological merits though, as ten minutes in you’ll get a bird making a joke about their ass, if not showing it to you outright.
​
It isn’t that I wanted this film to be good. Hell, if it even had the polish of a film in the Madagascar series, it would still be serviceable in the vast plain of animated feature films that already exist. Sadly, a great deal of people will be going to see this. Sadly, a lot of people are going to look upon this and laugh, more often it is the adults in the audience who will be having a family meeting once the film lets out. But any fan of the games on mobile, any self-respecting nerd, or any fan of the cinema, even on the kid-friendly animated level, is going to take a cue from the theme of this film, and be pretty flocking mad. 

---