Spinning off of an imaginative,
Monsters, Inc-like concept about a community of video game
characters living within the same arcade, Wreck-It Ralph may
seem at a distance to be little more than a nostalgia trip for
parents and a seizure-inducing distraction for their kids, but the
marketing is a mirage. While it starts out merely as a clever homage
to the arcade culture of the eighties, it transitions into something
more substantial and compelling before its ingenious but admittedly
thin premise has the opportunity to wear out its welcome. You need
not be a gamer in order to relate to this beautifully spun tale about
seeking acceptance and discovering self-worth, which is frankly the
best movie Walt Disney Studios has given us since its 1990s heyday.
It's like the Pixar movie we never got last year (what is this Cars
2 of which you speak?).
We all know what it's like to be in a
rut; that feeling of desperation that comes from going through the
motions of a dissatisfying routine, the frustration of being doomed to
your “lot in life” when you desire so much more. Wreck-It Ralph
(John C. Reilly) understands it all too well. He, the villain of an antiquated arcade
game called “Fix-It Felix Jr.”, has been performing the same
Sisyphean grind for 30 years. Ralph wrecks the building, Felix (John
McBrayer) fixes the building. Felix is rewarded with medals and
admiration from the tenants, Ralph is tossed in the mud and made to
sleep on a heap of discarded bricks all by himself. Sunrise, sunset.
But three decades of being lonely and undervalued is as much as Ralph's fragile self-esteem is willing to tolerate. He's movin' out. Ralph stows away on a first-person shooter called “Hero's Duty”, overseen by the tough-as-brass Sgt. Calhoun (Jane Lynch) in order to win a medal that might finally earn him some respect. Of course, things don't go so smoothly, as he inadvertently unleashes a virus that threatens the whole arcade.
The often hilarious – and
occasionally quite moving – screenplay by Jennifer Lee and Phil
Johnston wisely dispenses with the bulk of the video game references
in the first act while establishing for us the rules that govern our
pixellated players and the worlds they inhabit. Once the arcade is
closed , game characters can hop the train to different games via the
power cords that link them together. This allows, say, all the bad
guys to convene at Pac-Man's for their villain support group, or say,
grab a drink at Tapper's (yes, the very same 1983 classic) after a
hard day of running around on screen for quarter-popping gamers. But
they must take caution, as dying outside of your own game will not
allow you to regenerate. Worse yet, if a game is unplugged then
everyone inside goes down with the ship. And you thought just playing
video games was violent!
All this exposition would be a pill if
it weren't for the wall-to-wall humour that accompanies it. Director
Rich Moore, the Emmy-winning director of Futurama and The
Simpsons, has the screen filled
with subtle sight gags and delightful details that old-school game
fanatics will enjoy freeze-framing on home video to spot. It's all a
barrel of fun to be sure, but Moore and his savvy writers know that
this can't hold an entire film. Their key tactic is that they lay off
the in-jokes and focus solely on character and plot development in
the second act, which sees poor Ralph winding up in a candy-themed
kart racer game called “Sugar Rush”, where he loses his medal to
an impish wannabe speedster Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman).
The
shift the film takes at this point from witty pop culture allusion to
buddy comedy may seem like a step backwards at first, but the
thematic and character foundations that end up getting laid here are
invaluable to the third act payoffs, as the relationship between
Ralph and Vanellope becomes the heart of the film. Both are outsiders
who yearn to be embraced by others but are damned by the labels
bestowed upon them; one a bad guy, the other a “glitch”. Reilly
and Silverman are instrumental in bringing this unexpected dynamic of
the film to life. Reilly is warm and appealing, but also embodies a
prickliness that comes from an unfulfilled life. And it's much to
Silverman's credit that her character, who could easily have
fallen off the tightrope that suspends her so precariously above the
threshold of insufferable annoyance, actually elicits even more
sympathy than the already sympathetic lead.
Vibrantly designed and featuring
outstanding character animation, Wreck-It Ralph is no less
impressive a technical feat than it is a specimen of first rate
storytelling. The score is a bit on the nose at times, but the
overall sound design by Gary Rydstrom (who's been tearing it up on
the animation front this year with also Brave and From Up
on Poppy Hill to his name) is pretty great.
***1/2 out of ****
