Title: Angry Birds
Director: Clay Kaytis and Fergal Reilly
Summary: Find out why the birds are so angry. When an island populated by happy, flightless birds is visited by mysterious green piggies, it’s up to three unlike outcasts – Red, Chuck, and Bomb – to figure out what the pigs are up to.
I am absolutely a child at heart. I collect toys, I watch cartoons and I love all things that most kids love. That being said I also realize that there is a huge difference between being a ‘kid’s movie’ and a ‘family movie’. A ‘kid’s movie’ is one that the kids in the audience will really like but the parents that are there are going to find it dull at best and annoying at worst. A ‘family movie’ is one that kids and parents can both enjoy, if not for the same reasons. I didn’t have the best feeling going into Angry Birds because it is based off of a mobile game that reached peak popularity in 2011 that didn’t have much of a story to begin with. You can make a good movie out of anything so I tried to be as positive as possible going in.
Angry Birds feels at least two years too late to the be relevant, with an occasional good joke that they repeat ad nauseum.
Angry Birds tries very hard to find a story to explain the very simple game it’s based on and it isn’t even a very interesting one. Red (Jason Sudeikis) is a bird with anger management issues on an island populated by nothing but happy birds. This all changes when the Pigs arrive and their leader Leonard (Bill Hader) that Red immediately distrusts. You can feel the movie straining to come up with an explanation as to why the birds have a giant slingshot and why they think flinging themselves in it is the best plan of attack. It feels like the movie contrives reason after reason as to why the birds are using the slingshot and then that scene is barely ten minutes long. By that point the movie was mostly over and I had spent the entire time wondering what I was doing there and what was the point of this aside from brand management.
I’m a person that loves a good (or terrible) pun. In fact I would say 90% of my sense of humor are puns so you would think that a movie that is nothing but puns would be hilarious to me. It wasn’t. In fact I don’t think I really had a single laugh out loud moment the entire time. Lines such a ‘pluck my life’ are one of the various different lines that you see in a movie like this. There are jokes but like all jokes the lack of timing ruins everything. The movie doesn’t let a good joke stay long enough for anyone to appreciate and jokes that start off good are held for way too long. There is a scene where the birds going swimming in a lake until they find out it’s basically a toilet and we get like a two minute shot of someone peeing in the water. It goes on and on and on and I wanted to tell the movie ‘we get it’. They were swimming and drinking pee. Let’s move on. There were a bunch of moments like that because no one in this movie understands what a punchline is.
If I didn’t know better I never would have guessed this movie was only ninety-seven minutes long because it felt like an eternity to me. The pacing was strange and, like I said, we were all waiting for the entire point of the movie that never seemed to come. The story was both threadbare and somewhat way too convoluted at the same time. Why did the Pigs come to Bird Island and immediately know that they want to eat the eggs? Have they done this to other islands of birds because these birds think their island is the only island? Why can’t these birds fly? The movie tries to frame itself like a 3D Universal Studios ride as it swung around in insane directions to the point that I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who gets motion sickness. As for me the 3D gave me a horrible headache.
Angry Birds is movie that tries to have jokes for both kids and adults but both of them fall very short. The movie seems to know that it really only has enough material for a short, so every moment felt like filler. As someone who loves kids movies and makes a lot of bad puns I can’t recommend Angry Birds. There isn’t a single redeemable moment in this entire enterprise aside from watching Angry Birds creators Rovio milk their one franchise to death.
