YouSeenThat.com
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Joined: 22/2/2013
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“UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, START”
Growing-up in the 80′s was a magical time: Gremlins, Garbage Pail Kids, big hair, Michael Bolton, Hulk Hogan, Glo-Worms… all the cool shit that served to transform your average wide-eyed tyke into the big-balled sexual Tyrannosaurus that can now be found stalking the Action movie section of your nearest Blockbuster. Of course the true hunting ground for callipygian supermen of the 80′s was the local video game arcade. The arcade was a place where scores could be settled without the need to shoot-up your local high school with a semi-automatic weapon. A place where chicks could be pulled with the prowess of your pizza-grease-enhanced joystick skills. A place where a nobody could feel like a god for a hour if they fluked beating the arcade owners son in a game of Street Fighter via a covert fit of button mashing. Those were the days. Days seemingly long gone in an era dominated by mobile gaming and the humble family console. Le sigh. The good thing is that at least we now have Wreck-It Ralph to kick us in the proverbial memory lane.
Wreck-It Ralph centres around the titular video game villain Ralph (John C. Reilly) who after thirty years of being the bad guy in ‘Fix-It Felix’ sets out to fulfill his dream of being the hero, but his quest soon brings havoc to the entire arcade in which he lives.
If you couldn’t tell from our little nostalgia spazz-out in the opening paragraph – WE FRIGGIN’ LOVE VIDEO GAMES! For a hobby that’s seemingly so universal and beloved by hundreds of millions, it’s kind of amazing to believe that an animated feature like Wreck-It Ralph hasn’t come along sooner. Let’s be honest, there’s been at least a two-decade lull in true video game related movies. Forget about the new Tron movie and anything directed by Uwe Boll – we’re talking about instant classics. Yes folks, cast your mind all the way back to movies like WarGames and the seminal cult classic The Wizard, a thinly-veiled Nintendo advertisement starring that midget from The Wonder Years.
So will Wreck-It Ralph go down as a classic in years to come?
There’s a good chance it will. It’s incredibly rare that any movie, let alone an animated movie, can illicit such strong feelings of nostalgia in our cold, black hearts… but somehow Wreck-It Ralph manages to do just that. As the premise of the Wreck-It Ralph universe became apparent in the opening twenty minutes, video game characters who work inside of arcade games and can commute back and forth between games via some sort of electronic subway, we have to admit that it gave us the biggest, cheesiest smile that we can remember in a long time. The concept is slick and totally cool. Throw in a host of a video game character cameos, like Sonic the Hedgehog, Zangief, Pac-Man, and Q*Bert, and we were in 8-bit heaven.
It was safe to say we were in love with Ralph’s quest for redemption.
However a lot of that early brilliance seemed to be lost when we suddenly became bogged down in the central story involving Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) and the Sugar Rush game. Vanellope is a ‘glitch’ that Ralph encounters in the sugar-filled Mario Kart clone, and without spoiling too much of the story, Ralph does his best to help Vanellope compete against the other racers in order to gain a spot on the in-game driver roster. In many ways it’s a story that is parallel to Ralph’s own quest for validation, although, for the most part it seems to chug along and steal far too much focus from the myriad of other cool games and characters Ralph could have been interacting with instead. Given the fact that at least half of the movie takes place in Sugar Rush, it becomes very tiresome, very quickly. It’s a shame really, while on the whole Wreck-It Ralph is a lot of fun, every minute in that world felt like an opportunity lost to explore other video game genres in more detail.
Story complaints aside, the characters of Wreck-It Ralph are a lot of fun. Wreck-It Ralph and Fix-It Felix (Jack McBrayer) are your archetypal 8-bit counterparts – think Donkey Kong and Mario, Calhoun (Jayne Lynch) as the seemingly hard-nosed military bitch, and the raft of cameos from famous video game characters were a welcome addition – half the fun of watching Wreck-It Ralph was keeping your eyes peeled for who would pop-up in the background. The voice acting that went long with those characters is also hard to fault, everything seemed to fit. No complaints there.
Despite the subject matter, Wreck-It Ralph isn’t aimed entirely at the kids either. We actually found ourselves chuckling out loud far more than any of the kids in the audience, something which is pretty rare with an animated movie. Maybe a lot of it had to do with the subtle nods to the gaming culture that we so fondly grew up with, however there were some great jokes in there – one off the top of our heads would be the ‘would you hit someone with glasses’ gag. Well played, indeed.
Obviously from the tone of our review it should go without saying that we found Wreck-It Ralph an enjoyable experience, however we were left with the feeling that the filmmakers missed out on a prime opportunity to really smash the story out of the 8-bit ballpark. We would have loved for Ralph to experience more of other popular real-life arcade games and focus a little less on the saccharine world of Sugar Rush and Miss Vanellope. Sure, the movie was bordering on two hours in length as it was, but imagine a scene with Ralph reluctantly slugging it out with old mate Zangief in a game of Street Fighter? Maybe dodging some barrels from none other than Donkey Kong? One or two additional scenes like that would have would have catapulted Wreck-It Ralph from pretty good territory into pretty great territory. Oh? And where the hell was Mario? It couldn’t have been like Nintendo weren’t behind the project given that Bowser and various other Nintendo paraphernalia was scattered throughout the movie. Sigh, we can only hope that a Wreck-It Ralph 2 is somewhere on the horizon.
Overall, Wreck-It Ralph fills a void that has long been neglected in animated features – video games. The premise is great, the characters are memorable, the tip of the hat to decades of gaming culture is incredibly satisfying – our only real complaint was that it probably didn’t run far enough with the concept. It’s a pity, but like we say, we’d certainly aren’t adverse to a potential sequel. Make it so Hollywood eggheads!
3.5/5
< Message edited by elab49 -- 22/2/2013 9:19:26 AM >
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