Heralded by one of the most amusing trailers of the year (see below) and backed by an established franchise, can Angry Birds maintain its high flying trajectory?…
The movie opens with an introduction of what makes Red the way he is, including a chain of events that leads him to trouble with the law. The sequence is well crafted and has equal measures of pathos and comedy. This structure continues as we are introduced to the new guys in Reds’ life, Bomb (voiced by Danny McBride) and Chuck (Josh Gad). The characters play off each other well as they develop their story within the bird community; unfortunately the bottom falls out of the script the moment the pigs arrive.
Clearly struggling to create a logical motive or believable plot structure, the movie rapidly deteriorates into a very expensive series of cut scenes from the game, which do look and sound fantastic thanks to great voice artists and soundtrack. However, having paid for the privilege of watching it you don’t expect to see quite so clearly where the writers got bored, wrote insert animation and clicked send to studio.
Jason Sudeikis as Red gives a performance steeped with heavy sarcasm, which perhaps reflects his opinion of the movie; it is certainly a very believable piece of voice acting. Sudeikis mentioned in an interview the importance in childrens’ cinema to include the adults who are often half the audience, the writers of Angry Birds have certainly taken this on board. To achieve this they have written twice the amount of jokes in a “one for you, one for me” fashion. The net effect of this blur of slapstick and toilet humour is a comedic numbness, where all that stands out are the occasional strands of plot direction. The concept of leaving your audience wanting more has not been applied in any way to this movie.
As a half length short posted on Youtube or Netflix it could have done moderately well, however as a big budget movie for the cinema there is no justification for it! The story teeters towards suggesting anger has its place in society, which is an odd point to make and certainly not a message to teach kids. It rests heavily on its huge market awareness and money rather than script or direction to draw attention, and sadly will probably still double the studios money purely because of marketing.
Artistically, you can tell a lot of love went into creating the visually beautiful world. It’s unfortunate Angry Birds had nothing more to offer than being a mindless on screen time-waster.
Author – Joe, Bath store
