Turbo

Matt Fowler started his review by saying, “There's nothing overtly wrong with Dreamworks Animation's slick (from snail slime) new summer kid-pleaser, but for a movie about a speed-obsessed snail who - just go with it - enters the Indy 500, it sure does sit there. It's easy, formulaic and light on laughs. But, for those dragged to see it by children, it won't make you want to rub salt in your eyes. So it's a faint fail or a faint pass, depending on your resilience.”

Ryan Reynolds voices Theo (aka “Turbo”) a snail strangely determined to be as fast as a NASCAR racer. As if you could hear from a pitch meeting, “Wouldn’t it be funny if a snail wanted to be fast? Because they’re so slow!” Paul Giamatti voices Turbo’s “Isn’t the life we have just fine?” brother, Chet, who mostly yells lines like “It’s not natural!” and “That’s not what Mother Nature had in mind!” as Turbo a lot that you come to realize, after 10 minutes, that the villain in this film is reality. After endless arguing between a grouch and an unnatural dreamer, you begin to resent both sides of the argument.

Fowler admitted, “In fact, and this is where I'll lose some of you (but it's where my mind goes when I'm bored during a kids' movie), there's a struggling LGBT undercurrent to the whole story. Especially when it comes to how much Turbo wants to desperately change who he is as a creature entirely. And, subsequently, how much he's told that he's wrong for wanting to be something different. You get relentlessly beaten about the head by both sides of the fence so much that after a while you have to clear the cobwebs and remember that you're watching a stunt-casted cartoon flick.”

However, none of that works against the movie as such. That’s what most of these animated films have come to be. Someone wants the impossible and then they get it because, as predicted, happy endings and all of that. All they have to do for their part is never stop wanting it.

What drags “Turbo,” released in 2013, down is how we’ve just seen so much of it before. Fowler noted, “It's got some Madagascar in it (director David Soren helmed the Madagascar TV specials), some Toy Story (bad seed kid who loves to squash snails gets tables turned on him) and a lot of Cars - complete with its own version of customer-starved Radiator Springs, here a Van Nuys strip mall called Starlight Plaza. So it's a Franken-feature through and through.”

Fowler continued, “Turbo, after becoming a hazard to his own garden community, heads out into the San Fernando Valley one night and accidentally gets shellacked in a street racer's nitrous oxide, giving him super-snail speedster abilities.” From there, he and Chet, both disliked, find a new home with some novelty racing snails (sure) in a garage next to a struggling taco stand run by brothers Tito and Angelo, voiced by Michael Peña and Luis Guzmán. As we find out, Tito is also a dreamer and it’s his underdog thinking that takes Turbo, along with fellow plaza shop owners, voiced by Michelle Rodriguez, Ken Jeong, and Richard Jenkins, to Indianapolis to race in the big leagues.

From there the story plays out as predictably as possible, leaving little room for surprise or inspiration. Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop Dogg, and Maya Rudolph play members of Turbo’s rag-tag daredevil snail team as the movie tries its hardest to convince you that a super-powered snail is somehow the underdog in a racing sport, even though he’s already so much superior just by being a supernatural “thing that should not be.” A chemical has enhanced his abilities.

This is another animated movie that I saw late at night with my sister and one of my younger cousins, and we enjoyed it. This is a nice movie, even though this is another by-the-book animated film that we have seen repeatedly. Still, I think it was enjoyable. Check it out because I think everyone will have a good time watching it.

Next week, we will be finishing “Samuel L. Jackson Month” with a movie that my sister recommended I watch.