Fish and Cherries Productions

Summary: Bird Island is populated entirely by happy birds, which makes Red (Jason Sudeikis) a bit of an outcast when he has an outburst and is sent to anger management. He gets acquainted with the instructor Matilda (Maya Rudolph) and his fellow recovering birds; the quick jabberjaw Chuck (Josh Gad), the timid and literally explosive Bomb (Danny McBride), and the perpetually quiet Terrance (Sean Penn). But things change quickly when a ship full of pigs led by their king Leonard (Bill Hader) approaches the birds in peace, giving them technology like the slingshot and the helium balloon. Red, however, isn’t so welcoming and his suspicions are proven true when the pigs steal all of their eggs and take them back to their island. Red, Chuck, and Bomb decide to band together and lead the birds to get their eggs back, even if they need to get angry.

Review: The Angry Birds Movie is a pointless and completely cynical excuse for a children’s movie. I say “children’s movie” because I don’t see anyone else being even even remotely entertained by this. It was tailor made to pander to kids through lowest common denominator humor to attract them and have them drag their parents to the box office. And what is this pandering humor they feel that kids deserve?

Butts.

Loads and loads of butts. Big butts, shaking butts, butts as obstacles, butts as weapons, butts as far as the eye can see. Butts of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Gobs and gobs of greasy, grimy gopher butts. Here a butt, there a butt, everywhere a butt-butt. They’re all about that bass, ’bout that bass, no treble. Butts, bottoms, buttocks, hindquarters, gluteus maximi, rear ends, moneymakers, derrières, posteriors, tuckas, big fat fannies, MOUNDS UPON MOUNDS OF ASSES!

Now, you might think this means all the humor is infantile… and you’d be wrong. There are some very out of place adult jokes peppered throughout. When all the eggs are stolen, Josh Gad’s character suggests everyone forgets about the eggs and, to quote “get bis-ay.” Some might argue that The Incredibles used this joke and no one got up in arms about it. I would respond that The Incredibles didn’t accompany that joke with overt crotch thrusting to drive the point home, thus taking the subtext and making it giant bold text. I don’t even get it; were they hoping that this one raunchy joke would make it worth the while of all the adults who had to sit through endless butt jokes? Because… it doesn’t.

If the humor wasn’t bad enough, the implications make the whole thing really uncomfortable. Let me see if I understand the plot. A group of foreigners wash up onto the mainland with loads of other people being smuggled in with them. Despite this deception, the people accept them and integrate them into their society, barring one suspicious individual with no evidence who ropes his friends into his little conspiracy. The foreigners then betray the trust of the people by stealing their babies and livelihoods, thus proving the naysayer completely and totally right. Said naysayer then organizes his island to invade and completely destabilize the foreigners’ nation. And this WASN’T written by a paranoid border patrolman?

I’m not even sure that fans of the video game would like it because of all the weird decisions they made. As per some strange custom in video game movies, the actual content of the game (i.e.: the slingshotting and such) doesn’t happen until the final third of the movie. This makes sense, of course, because why would anyone who came to see The Angry Birds Movie want to see the Angry Birds do their thing? Also, in the games, the pigs want to eat the eggs, but when Leonard first sees an egg, he enters a dream sequence that makes it look like he wants to make love to it. It’s just bizarre and surreal and I don’t know what to make of it, unless they want him to eat the egg in a different way. Again, this movie was marketed to kids.

I guess if you’re really into seeing animated butts and a lot of pig puns… like, a LOT of pig puns (I actually swore at the screen when I saw a poster for Hamilton), this is the movie for you. Admittedly, that’s a pretty small demographic to aim for. It’s not the worst movie ever, but it really bugs me that they’re trying to push this on kids. I don’t think it’ll damage them, but it gets to me that some filmmakers seem to think that bright colors, toilet humor, and some random adult jokes is enough to give to children, and it’s not. Children deserve better. You deserve better.

Fun Tidbit: This is the second video game based movie that Josh Gad and Peter Dinklage costarred in together, the first being Pixels. Yeah, I didn’t mention because it wasn’t important, but Peter Dinklage plays Mighty Eagle, a former idol who became self-obsessed and really let himself go. Oh wow, that’s kind of similar to his character from Pixels…