Busy and charmless, you know what you’re in for from the start of this corporate-managed CGI animation as soon as you notice the two leads get whatever personality they have by looking like street-art caricatures of the famous actors doing their voices. That’d be Will Smith and Tom Holland.* The latter a nerdy orphan boy, grown up to be Mr. Gadget at some spy organization, like ‘Q’ in the James Bond films. That Bond influence coming secondhand, more INCREDIBLES/’04 than ‘007;’ and barely touching on the credited source material, PIGEON: IMPOSSIBLE/’09, a delightful low-resolution CGI short. (See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEjUAnPc2VA) There, the gimmick has a hungry pigeon stuck inside a nuclear launch lock-box. Here, Will Smith’s top-dog agent accidentally drinks Holland’s latest experimental transmutation potion, turning his fine self into a pigeon. All things considered, the film, if rarely memorable, is better than it might be (though the ‘Pro-Nerd’ moral is awfully heavy-handed), but apparently not popular enough to hatch any sequels, presumably the point of the enterprise.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *On the other hand, the main villain looks less like voice actor Ben Mendelsohn than a ten-minute/$12 hand-drawn/suitable-for-framing caricature of Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Guess he wasn’t available.
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