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Review: Wreck-It Ralph (3 1/2 Stars)

Posted by Charlie Truong on

Toy Story for a New Generation

Expectations

I was pretty excited going into the movie.  The initial reviews were highly positive, and the overall concept spoke to me.  I am a huge video game fan, so imagining a Toy Story-like movie with cameos from classic games fueled my anticipation.

Review

The student has become the master.  Disney Animation one-ups Pixar with the best animated movie of the year.  Wreck-it Ralph has a heartwarming story that will create lots of nostalgia for video game lovers.

Wreck-it Ralph is set in an arcade where the video game characters, like in Toy Story, come to life after the users leave for the night.  The characters can interact across games by traveling via the electrical cords.  The main character Ralph is the villain of his game Fix-it Felix, a fictional game inspired by Donkey King; however, Ralph wants to be more than a villain.  He wants to be the hero who wins a medal and accolades.  So, since he cannot be the hero in his own game, he jumps games to succeed elsewhere.

The highest points in the film happen when Ralph interacts with “real” video game characters with which fans are familiar.  I felt bad seeing Q-bert down on his luck because his game was unplugged.  The support group for video game villains is just hilarious.  I am surprised at how many characters they were able to get, especially the Street Fighter ones.  Zangief easily steals the show even though he was only briefly seen.

It’s unfortunate we were not able to spend more time with the actual video game characters.  A good part of the movie is spent in fictitious game settings created for the express purpose of the film.  Still, Wreck-it Ralph is very enjoyable without the cameos.  Ralph himself is very likable as a character.  You will be cheering for him in the end.  A central part of the story is his relationship with another misfit, Vanellope, who is a character in a cart racer.  Their interaction is hilarious as Vanellope enjoys poking fun at Ralph.  The bond they develop through the course of the movie is touching.

With video games’ vast history, the possibilities for sequels are endless.  The filmmakers need to consider switching the setting to perhaps the characters inhabiting a console instead of the arcade.  The arcade will limit the types of games with which the characters can interact.  Perhaps Wreck-it Ralph and Sugar Rush are downloaded as classic games on someone’s Xbox?  Regardless, I am eagerly awaiting the next movie.

Review: End of Watch (4 Stars)

Posted by John Dwyer on

I didn’t know what I was getting into with End of Watch.  It shared a writer, David Ayer (who wrote and directed End of Watch), with Training Day and from previews that’s what I thought this was going to be.  A thriller about corrupt cops in which you can’t necessarily tell the good guys from the bad guys at any point in the film.  In End of Watch, you’ll never find yourself questioning who the good guys are here.  It’s made abundantly clear who they are, and who the bad guys are.  Instead it’s a sort of realistic take on the whole buddy cop thing, and an exploration of how incredibly tense the lives of police officers can be.

This movie works incredibly well because the relationship between Officers Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Zevala (Michael Pena) it completely realized.  First credit here has to be go to the actors themself.  I’ve never been a huge Gyllenhaal fan, but this is his best performance as far as I’m concerned.  It has all of the nuance you’d want, but doesn’t seem over-emoted or predictable.  The reason for this, I think, is because Michael Pena is absolutely fantastic in End of Watch.  He forms the perfect other half of the relationship and the chemistry between the two actors renders the entire thing believeable.

Second credit for the relationship central to the film has to go to David Ayer’s screenplay.  The dialogue is realistic and by turns both affecting and hilarious– and despite the sheer volume of it, I never found it boring or repetitive.  From a film making standpoint this movie has some other strong points.  Some of the action is very well done, the violence shocking, and the tension at times was nearly unbearable.  That said, for some reason the film has an almost-realized found footage aspect.  I’m not sure about you, but found footage is pretty much played out as far as I’m concerned… And in this movie, it’s like they couldn’t quite decide if it was found footage or not.  It was used in maybe 85% or more of the footage, so too much to be just an enhancement to individual scenes.  And yet, at times End of Watch went omniscient when it had to.  Anyway, the found footage did nothing for this film.

I went in expecting a regular cop drama type of movie, and got a lot more than I bargained for.  A weird use of found footage style is the only thing that really didn’t work in this movie.

4 stars