Movie Review: The Angry Birds Movie

It feels so odd to have an Angry Birds film in 2016. It was an app, whose target audience was supposedly children, created in 2009 and, by 2012, it had sold 12 million copies. Throughout the years, there have been many variations of the app, but the main point of the game always dealt with angry birds and shooting those same birds at some sort of target. Now, ten years later, is the feature-length animated adaption, The Angry Birds Movie, too late? Overall, The Angry Birds Movie is not terrible but it’s too simple to fully work.

Following the characters and settings from the app, the plot of the film centers on Red (Jason Sudeikis), a very mean-spirited bird who is sent to anger management class. After their island is taken over and their eggs are stolen by a group of pigs, led by Leonard (Bill Hader), Red and the other birds must come together to take back what is theirs.

A friend of mine wondered how an Angry Birds film would work since the game itself didn’t have much of a plot. It’s a good point. In the film, you don’t have much of a plot either nor can it build off anything. Sure, what’s there is somewhat original and the island setting is a fresh take but it’s a plot that is searching for something that just isn’t there. What plot there is is very muddled and it’s hard to figure out exactly what motivation, if any, the pigs have. From to nightclub partying and copyboy theme, the pigs’ personality is all over the place and the just don’t produce a lot of laughs.

The next issue is the characters, or lack thereof. Red is a main character who is hard to gravitate to because he’s too mean spirited especially for a kid’s film and his backstory is muddled. You can’t next really like any member of his group of anger management classmates or other birds like Bomb (Danny McBride), Chuck (Josh Gad), or Terence (Sean Penn) because they are characters with even less of a story than Red.

It can struggle on a lot of things, but as with any kid’s film, how does this work for the children? It actually doesn’t have a lot of bathroom humor, which I didn’t expect. Yet it still doesn’t have a lot of humor that works for kids, let alone adults. The animation looks fine for what it is and it comes together nicely in a fun final action scene, but it seems to take forever to get to it.

When it comes together, The Angry Birds Movie is a very cliché-driven film going every which you can expect. It’s a film that will sadly struggle to attract kids. With a studio willing to put out a film based on an app, questions come to mind if more studios are willing to do the same for other popular games or apps. The reaction to The Angry Birds Movie and the mess it is might be an edict to stop making films from apps.

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Alexander Wolff

Alexander Wolff started writing film reviews at a young age and continues to do so in his college days on a daily basis. A critic for numerous websites and a member of the film press. Famous for living right by 8 Mile, Alexander spends many weekends in Toledo, Ohio as a huge supporter of Toledo Walleye hockey and Toledo sports.

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