Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) Review

 "My love of cheese got the best of me."
-Monterey Jack



Years after the end of the show Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, former cast member, Monterey Jack (Eric Bana), is kidnapped.  Chip (John Mulaney) and Dale (Andy Samberg), who have been estranged since the show ended, are forced to reunite to rescue their friend.


What Worked:

I love the world of this movie.  Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, this is a world where humans and toons live together.  A lot of this movie is spent exploring that world and we get to see some really neat ideas.  My favorite is the Uncanny Valley neighborhood, where everyone looks realistic, yet wrong.  It's the stuff of nightmares and wonderful.

On that note, my favorite performance in the movie comes from Seth Rogan, who plays Bob, a dwarf from the Uncanny Valley.  His eyes are souless and I love how he is animated.  Rogan's performance makes the character even funnier and he's fantastic whenever Bob is on screen. 

There are all sorts of animated characters in this movie from all different types of animation.  Even Chip and Dale are different.  Chip's has his classic style, while Dale has gone through CGI surgery.  We get the aforementioned Uncanny Valley animation as well as some Claymation.  It's awesome stuff.

Finally, this movie has great energy too it and you can feel the love and creativity flowing through it.  It wasn't entirely my cup of tea, which I'll get into later, but I respect the passion the filmmakers had for the film and the respect they had for the original show, (which I've only ever seen one episode of, for the record).


What Sucks:

Like I said above, I loved the world-building of the movie, but there are deifinately areas I wish they had explored more.  The bootlegging studio was something I was supremely interested in.  It had the potential to have some awesome body horror, while still keeping it a kids movie.  While they do give us the awesome sequence involving Flounder (Rachel Bloom), they don't do enough with it for the rest of the movie.  I just wish we could have gotten more from certain parts of the film.

The comedy definitely landed more on the miss side of things instead of the hit.  I just didn't laugh very much, but I felt like I should have been.  I like Andy Samberg, but, for whatever reason, the jokes didn't work for me most of the time.

Finally, there are a ton of cameos in this movie.  While I did enjoy a few of them, most of them felt like they were only there to be there.  Like the whole joke is that the movie referenced them.  That's it.  Randy Marsh's appearance is a good example.  He's just there in the background.  Why not do something with him?  I would have rather had original toons fill the background instead of meaningless appearances from other IP's.  It gave me Space Jam: A New Legacy vibes and that's not a good thing.


Verdict:

I think this movie was a bit overhyped for me.  While I love some of the creative elements, the different animation styles, and Seth Rogan's character, I felt like the movie could have done more exploration of the interesting world it created.  Plus a lot of the comedy doesn't work and the various cameos felt cheap.  It's a good movie still, but I was expecting a lot more.

 7/10: Good 

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