Movie Review

Sing serves up a heap of mindless, soulless entertainment

It has become readily apparent over the years that no other American animated movie studio is willing to challenge Disney when it comes to making films with complex emotions. Notwithstanding the occasional one-off movie, the other studios are content to stay within the fun/adventure mode, rarely approaching anything that resembles anger or sadness.

Many films have succeeded doing just that, but the problem comes when a film focuses purely on surface storytelling, trying to force fun without actually engaging with its characters. That’s the biggest failing of Sing, a movie that’s designed to make you feel good through song, yet can’t do it because it never makes you care about its characters.

Those characters include Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey), a koala who comes up with the idea for a singing competition to save his failing historic theater. Among the ones attracted by the contest are pig Rosita (Reese Witherspoon), mouse Mike (Seth MacFarlane), porcupine Ash (Scarlett Johansson), elephant Meena (Tori Kelly), and gorilla Johnny (Taron Egerton), among others.

And that’s basically all there is to the film. Writer/director Garth Jennings gives some insight into the personal lives of each main character, but he ping-pongs between each of them so much that nothing ever really sticks. It’s a manic kind of storytelling where they seem to be telling you a lot, but you actually learn nothing at all.

The songs are obviously what the movie hinges on, but here too the movie falls down on the job. They're a mishmash of genres and time periods, assigned to characters with little thought as to why they should be singing that particular song. Unlike the recent Trolls, which integrated pop music into to its story to a fantastic degree, Sing throws out songs as throwaway gags, just hoping to get some kind of reaction.

Its use of a variety of animal characters also makes it pale in comparison to another recent animated movie, Zootopia. In that film, each species, despite walking and talking like a human, had distinct animal characteristics that made it more fun and interesting. In Sing, having the characters be animals makes no logical sense in the context of the film. Aside from making them extra cute or scary as the case may be, they rarely act like animals; having them be humans would have worked equally as well.

The voice actors work well for the most part, although, as usual, the use of big-name actors adds little of substance to the film. But having actors who can actually sing or, like Kelly, be an actual singer, at least serves to make their performances enjoyable. If only the rest of the film lived up to those abilities.

It’s obvious that the makers of Sing viewed the film as mindless entertainment for families during the Christmas holidays. Audiences deserve much more than that; don’t waste your time with this forgettable film.

Taron Egerton plays Johnny in Sing.

Taron Egerton in Sing

Photo courtesy of Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures

Taron Egerton plays Johnny in Sing.

Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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