Egg on Your Face

This review comes to you courtesy of Jordan Whitmore, who commissioned me for a review of a film that I saw in the cinema at age six, and had blessedly not thought about once in the intervening years.

There are a great many things that mark Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius out as a product of the early 2000s, from within the film and without, right on up to the fact that it exists at all. At a time when Disney (and traditional animation generally) was at a low ebb and Pixar had demonstrated massive financial and artistic success in the realm of 3D animation, but before anyone had really figured out how to replicate it, there was an anything-goes environment that hasn't really existed since the staggering success of Finding Nemo and Shrek 2 in the middle of the decade set the mold for most 3D animation. These days a film like Jimmy Neutron, adapted from a handful of 90s shorts and intended to kickstart a TV series, would have been consigned from day one to a straight-to-video or TV premiere. In fact, that was the precise fate intended for the film until Paramount decided that it looked vaguely enough like a real movie to release it in theatres because, essentially, there was no reason not to at the time. Thank god we now live in a more civilised time, when we can breathe easy and eagerly await the release of Cars 3.

Releasing Jimmy Neutron theatrically was an impulse that paid off, too, when the film grossed over three times its budget and managed to land itself an Academy Award nomination, of all fucking things. Not an unimpressive fate for a movie that is not for one second visually appealing in the slightest, and stuffed end-to-end with characters who don't resemble human beings, in appearance or in behaviour, rendered in the cheapest and ugliest CGI money could buy in 2001. I suppose those things are easier to overlook in the company of the film's impressive litany of jokes revolving around bodily functions, or its transparent stabs at promoting merchandise and its own TV spinoff series.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the adventures of its titular character (played by Debi Derryberry), a precocious 8-year-old from the town of Retroville whose antics are perpetually getting he and many of his peers into hot water. The most prominent of these other children are Carl Wheezer (Rob Paulsen), who is forever the subject of violence and ridicule, but is also fat, which makes it funny; Sheen Estevez (Jeffrey Garcia), who is obsessed with a superhero named Ultraman to the exclusion of all else; Nick Dean (Candi Milo), who wears denim and rides a skateboard and therefore could not be cooler by the standards of early-2000s media; and Cindy Vortex (Carolyn Lawrence), who has no time for Jimmy's reckless and impractical science and is therefore an uppity bitch who is jealous of how smart he is and probably has cooties too, because it's never too early to instill toxic attitudes like that in young boys.

Eventually, something like 30 minutes into a film that comes up at 79 total, the entire adult population of Retroville is kidnapped by aliens (whose king is played by an unfathomably overqualified Patrick Stewart) for reasons that are mostly contrived and entirely Jimmy's fault, and the film starts to shift gears into something that actually resembles a narrative. "Resembles", mind, because until the final fifteen minutes the film mostly continues to consist of aimless wackiness, but it's in space now and there's some lazy moralising about how total independence may look like fun, but children are really just helpless incompetents who should defer to their parents' wisdom at all times (Finding Nemo would end up treading similar thematic ground with a far more sensitive and nuanced approach only two years later).

Jimmy Neutron could not wear its television origins on its sleeve any more clearly. The entire film is locked into a rigidly monotonous episodic structure where five minutes of exposition leads into thirty seconds of gadget-fueled slapstick, over and over and over again until the film has spun its wheels long enough to scrape into feature length and everyone can fight the aliens and rescue their parents and go home. You could probably section the entire movie into ten-minute chunks and screen them one a week with no impact on its pacing or coherence, and for all I know that may have been the plan at one point or another during production.

While that's enough to seriously hamper the film, it might not necessarily be enough to bury it. "Gadget-based slapstick", after all, could also be used to describe Aardman animation's vastly wonderful Wallace and Gromit features, and they are masterpieces of animation all. Hell, Jimmy even has a robotic canine sidekick! The key difference is that Aardman's films are animated with great care and attention to detail, bursting at the seams with personality, while Jimmy Neutron was cobbled together with off-the-shelf animation software and burp jokes. It's a horrifyingly ugly movie, where everything is made up of textureless blobs and nobody has apparently ever heard of a neck. Seriously, Carl's head appears to jut out of the front of his torso, and poor Sheen is afflicted with a flat, chinless face that tapers to a point somewhere inside his shoulders.

It's funny, really, for a movie so concerning alien abductions to almost feel like it was made by aliens itself. Nothing in the animation or the writing or even the marketing suggests that anyone involved knew how human beings think or act or look. The film is entirely devoid of merit for adults, and I'm hard-pressed to imagine any child who would be more than moderately diverted by the lowbrow humour or the pandering concept. Certainly nobody then and especially not now could have responded with any great degree of positivity to its visual design or its cardboard cutout characters.

And yet I'd still sooner rewatch it than Shrek.

Not The Seth Rogen One

Going into The World's End, I had an unshakeable hunch that the movie I was about to see was not the one that most people were expecting. It's reasonable to expect that director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's follow-up to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, two of the funniest movies of their decade, might be similarly hilarious. And yet, going in, I couldn't shake the feeling that the new movie wasn't going to be very funny at all.

I am grateful for that hunch, because it turned out to be exactly right: The World's End is not very funny, and  in fact it's not really a comedy at all. There are maybe a dozen moments in the whole film that I found myself laughing out loud, and I think I laughed more often than anyone else in the cinema. So no, The World's End is not as funny as Shaun or Fuzz, but to get hung up on that is to risk missing the important fact that it is perhaps better than either of them. Which is, disappointing though the shift in tone and focus may be, ultimately the most important thing to take away from it.

I'm loathe to give away much if any of the movie, but it's difficult-unto-impossible to discuss what the film is and how it differs from its predecessors without at least talking about the first act, so here goes. Gary King (Pegg) dreams of a night in 1990 when he and five friends unsuccessfully attempted the "Golden Mile", a pub crawl that went through all twelve pubs in their hometown. Now entering his forties, Gary still considers that night the best of his life, but forever regrets not making it to the final pub on the route, The World's End. Hellbent on both conquering the challenge and recapturing the memories, he rounds up his old gang to take on the Mile once more. None of his old friends are very happy to see him again, least of all his once-best friend Andy Knightley (Frost), but all of them reluctantly agree to join him, if only to get him out of their hair once and for all.

Reunited, the gang returns home to find that the town has changed, and that Gary very much hasn't. He still treats his friends like props, squashing their feeble attempts to make the best of the night in the name of doggedly trying to repeat the past. Everyone's just about fed up only a few pubs in, when something happens that changes the course of the entire night. I won't say what, but where Shaun and Fuzz set their sights on zombie movies and buddy cop action respectively, The World's End is a science fiction film, specifically an alien invasion one. It's also a stunningly clever film, stuffed with grace notes that are sure to make repeat viewings satisfying for years to come. That much is to be expected of its pedigree, but what truly blindsided me is how biting the new film is. In place of jokes, The World's End has an abundance of complex, adult characters with very real problems and an array of themes that are expressed thoughtfully and (mostly) subtly.

There are two very important differences to this scenario as compared to the setups for the other two Cornetto films (for that is how the trilogy is collectively known): The first is the protagonist. While the slackers played by Pegg and Frost in the first two films were nobody's idea of a perfect human being they were likeable enough, and shaped by the actors and director with enough affection, that spending two hours with them in a silly comedy wasn't a hard ask. Gary, though, is too far gone to earn that kind of affection. He's too old, too desperate not to move on when everyone else has. He's pathetic, in a way that is far too raw and just plain sad to be funny. Pegg and Wright (who also wrote the script together) know this, and they are completely uncompromising - though not unsympathetic - in portraying him.

The second thing is that it takes a shockingly long time for the genre elements to rear their heads here. I didn't time it, but I'd estimate that things don't even begin to heat up until the thirty- or forty-minute mark of a film that comes in at a tidy 109 minutes total. This means that we spend an awfully long time in the company of Gary and his estranged friends before the carnage begins, and everything that happens afterwards is grounded by that first act. On top of that, the generic elements of the movie are far more subdued here than ever before. There are references aplenty, but they fade into the background , except where they intersect with the film's themes, or during its many action sequences. Gary may not be the biggest complication in his friends' lives any more, but they and the audience are never allowed to forget that their predicament is ultimately his fault.

The action sequences are, incidentally, fantastic. I run more cold than hot towards Wright's last film as director Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but one thing it had in abundance were dazzling and well-staged CGI-enhanced fight scenes, and the ones here more than live up to that standard. Wright has always been a smart director, and his instincts have never been sharper. His signature attention-grabbing editing motifs are back and better than ever, married to some truly beautiful cinematography by Bill Pope that takes on many distinct forms throughout the film, every one of them perfectly attuned to the emotional needs of the scene.

There are really only two things that I can really think of to say against the film. One of them is contextual; it simply does not feel of a piece with the other two Cornetto films, and there are enough deliberate callbacks that you can't entirely keep those films out of your head while watching. The other, and regrettably more serious flaw is the ending. It's not even that it's bad, as such, just that it doesn't feel like part of the same film, tonally or thematically. It's possible that I missed something, but I could not square the final moments of the film with everything that had gone before, and it left things on a slightly deflated note.

Still and all, The World's End is as fine a piece of popcorn entertainment as we've seen in this admittedly somewhat impoverished Summer season. Fun and fast-moving enough to never feel draggy, but rooted enough in intelligent and subtle characterisation to be satisfying and meaningful long after its fizzier pleasures have faded away.

8/10