2/5 stars
Over the years, videogame developers, like film studios, establish a certain pedigree. Nintendo’s Super Mario games are known for their endearing ingenuity and propensity to transcend audience brackets. Children enjoy them, adults enjoy them. If Nintendo released a bad Super Mario game, it wouldn’t sell. Trade-In shelves would be full of copies. But you can’t return a film ticket; which is a shame, because all the saccharine, lowest-common-denominator stylings of Wreck-It Ralph leave a bad taste in one’s mouth.
The concept is promising: a bad guy in a 1980s Donkey Kong-like arcade game is fed up of missing out on the adulation of the characters he terrorises, and wants to play the hero. In these early stages, the film reaches a peak that it never quite reconquers, with the springing movements of the squat, cherubic citizens of Ralph’s game reminding one of the animated pigeons in 2008’s Bolt, whose superbly lifelike neck movements and blinking eyes were an aesthetic triumph.
In a film that presents itself as an homage to videogames of the past, it should come as no surprise that Wreck-It Ralph takes the opportunity to rent out more of its advertising space, but it is still jarring to see Subway, Nestle and Mars products linger flatulently on the screen. Brand placement aside, the whole thing doesn’t look too bad. Not amazing, just not too bad. Entertaining characters like the goofy Fix-It Felix Jr. are underused, while John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman are consigned to pump bland sequences of dialogue with as much heroic gusto as possible.
After the cartoon-noir fairy-tale short of Paperman, the main feature seems oddly soulless. In the end, Wreck-It Ralph ends up emulating the worst kinds of cheap, by-the-numbers videogames. Its best moments, its best jokes, seem tacked on in a film that cheats its young audience out of an engaging storyline and its older audience out of an enjoyable, intelligent spectacle. Stay in the arcade. It will cost you less, and you’ll have a damn sight more fun.
James Killin