4.5/10
Neither the
Happyland Murders-level botch I was dreading nor the unexpectedly clever
Who Framed Roger Rabbit/
LEGO Movie meta-bash that critics have been surprisingly making claim to,
Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers is a typical piece of polished Corporate Product, taking a lite adventure/mystery series for kids that's old enough to be Officially Nostalgic yet semi-obscure enough to not rankle a
Star Wars-sized fanbase and thinking it's far more witty than it actually is. As someone who went into this dreading it, I was surprised at how not-terrible it was, yet 90% of the jokes just lay there, taking anemic potshots at today's "reboot culture" yet pulling its punches over and over, because this is just another example of said reboot culture. But, oh yes, it's
aware of how much it's wallowing in cliches, so that excuses it...right?
Unlike, say, the original
Scream, which sent up 80s slasher-movie tropes with a wink yet also functioned as an especially good example of those same horror cliches done with a great deal of suspenseful skill,
Rescue Rangers plays like it
wants to be a
Sausage Factory-style "naughty" take on 'toons, but lacking the balls to just go all-out with it, settling for a blandly inoffensive PG-rated paste that's bereft of kid-friendly gags and yet with the adult in-jokes landing with a leaden thud. But who cares about that, when we can just point at corners of the screen and squee over cameos by He-Man & Skeletor, the My Little Pony gang, and MC Skat Kat? There are a few stray chuckles, and some of the visual elements are clever (especially "Captain Putty", a gruff, Gumby-esque claymation chief detective brusquely voiced by J.K. Simmons), but mostly this is junk, too in-jokey for kids and lacking in cleverness or even much gratuitous nostalgia for adults (Monterey Jack - voiced, poorly, by Eric Bana - only appears fleetingly at the beginning to set up the film's central mystery, and Gadget - the show's breakout character, and basically a template for the "strong, self-sufficient female" trope that Disney's been beating into the ground for the last decade - only makes a brief appearance in the film's last half-hour, voiced by a noticeably older-sounding Tress MacNeille. And Zipper? Uhhhh, it takes a
weird turn). It's neither fish nor fowl, and the mostly positive reviews of this are baffling. It's not funny, it's not endearing (except on the most base, Pavlovian level), it reminds me of something Lukas said about shows like
Tiny Toon Adventures in the pages of FSM back in the day, about how it was "...certainly not for adults, but not really for kids, either. More like a show for adults to inspect to approve for their kids".