Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers - Cheap Thoughts

You know why Who Framed Roger Rabbit was successful? Because it wasn’t the cartoon references, that might certainly have gotten people into the seats, but that’s not what has kept people coming back to it for 40 years. It’s because of the effort. It’s because you notice how much time and detail went into every fraction of that movie, how the live-action actors interact with their 2-Dimensional counterparts, how the sets and props will do the same, how the film is designed to accurately function as a pastiche of 40s noir thrillers, and so on, and so on. It also does all this while telling its own story and keeping the references to simple set dressing.

You might say it’s unfair to begin this review by comparing one film to another made a long time ago, but that’s the thing, this film isn’t interested in being a real film, it just wants you to remember things. A self-referential irony plagued pop-culture nostalgia bate that offers nothing in terms of legitimate story or jokes, just plenty of pointing at the screen and saying “hey I remember that thing!”. You know what the worst part is? It’s not even the worst film amongst this genre. It’s still been beat out by Space Jam: A New Legacy as the most self-indulgent drivel that’s lucky a literal pandemic had to happen to stop it from being the worst thing to happen to cinemas. Yet somehow that makes this worse, it’s not even a film bad enough to worth getting angry about.

Everyone did the bare minimum, they showed up, did their bit, went home and thought nothing of it. Everything from the pathetically shallow performances that never convincingly have you believe these live-action actors and animated characters are ever sharing the same space, to the jokes that again all consist of “Hey remember this thing” except sometimes sprinkled in with “Hey remember this thing, we’re gonna have it be pathetic now”. Bit of advice for you filmmakers, if one of the big plot points of your film is that one character is traditionally animated and the other is computer generated, perhaps have the former be traditionally animated and not computer generated trying to look traditionally animated? But of course, doing that would require any kind of thought, or effort, or style, you know, the things needed to make a movie?

This is definitely a bare-bones lazy review, but this is a very lazy movie, it doesn’t deserve effort being put into discussing it because no effort was put into making it. It’s bad, of course it is, so let’s go home and think nothing of it.

-Danny