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RATCHET & CLANK
Directed by Kevin Munroe, with the voices of James Arnold Taylor, David Kaye, Jim Ward, Armin Shimerman, Paul Giamatti, John Goodman and Sylvester Stallone.
REVIEW: Leslie Felperin
ALTHOUGH probably faithful enough to appease hardcore fans of the game franchise it’s based on, animated feature Ratchet & Clank represents a resolutely middling effort when compared to other cartoon films on the market. The pic was never destined to rack up much theatrically, but that doesn’t matter, because clearly the main point of the whole exercise is brand dissemination and building a new audience for the games.
In the film’s crushingly predictable origin story, big-eared, orange-furred “cat thingy” Ratchet (James Arnold Taylor, who voiced the character in the games) teams up with oddball robot Clank (David Kaye, also a returning talent). Variously aided and thwarted by an assortment of brightly coloured but unappealing-looking secondary characters, the duo storm into battle to save various planets from destruction. The supporting cast spans a moral spectrum, with John Goodman-voiced father figure Grimroth at one end dispensing advice to Ratchet and Armin Shimerman’s super-evil Dr. Nefarious at the other end of the scale.
Somewhere in between there’s Jim Ward’s chisel-chinned blowhard Captain Qwark, easily corrupted by evil dictator Drek (Paul Giamatti). Nefarious’ glaringly unoriginal character design, with his huge swollen head and malnourished body, looks like a genetic splicing of the hero from Megamind and the aliens from Mars Attacks! That said, at least he does smoothly deliver the film’s funniest line.
The screenplay scatters sarcasm and tired self-referential gags like buckshot.
Although the laboured irony, snark and the brainy female characters (voiced by Bella Thorne and Rosario Dawson) lend Ratchet & Clank a 2016 flavour, in the end it feels very much like a throwback to the mid-1990s, that halcyon age when “synergy” was the big industry buzzword and adaptations of computer games were all the rage. – Reuters/ Hollywood Reporter