Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
There’s something to be said about the feeling of being taken so off guard by a film that it challenges your perception of movies from then after. This film looked great from the trailers I saw but of course a trailer can only showcase so much of a film’s merit aside from visual integrity and snippets of a well crafted script. No one was prepared for what this film had in store for them nor the film industry at large. This film is a masterpiece. It is perfection in the form of a cat in cute thick boots and it’s an anomaly on all accounts. The fact that it exists often feels like something that should be a part of an empirical study. The fact that this brilliantly crafted film is the sixth in a line of Shrek adjacent films while being a sequel to a spin-off about the second side-character from Shrek 2 has officially left no other film in existence with any excuses for mediocrity. The film stars Puss in Boots, played once again by Antonio Banderas, in his second theatrical release and he’s officially down to the last of his nine lives. He embarks on a journey to reclaim them by being the first to find the coveted wishing star. Of course, he isn’t the only one who wants to find it. A prize that bountiful comes with a whole host of people going after it and he’ll need to survive them all to make what he thinks his wish is to come true.When I first saw this film, it was due to good word of mouth from social media outlets. After so many scattered messages of hearing how good it was and seeing how good it looked from the trailers, I did eventually sit down and watch it in the comfort of my own home.Immediately after the film was done I ran downstairs and asked my brother and sister to come to the movie theater with me that same day so we could all see it together. I watched it again, that same exact day, and it strangely felt as though it had been a while since I had seen it. It honestly almost felt like I was watching it for the first time all over again.I had never done that with a film before, not in my entire life. Watching a film for free and then immediately feeling the need to pay to see it again isn’t a feeling that comes often for most people. That’s never even happened with something I’m typically a much bigger fan of than any of these Shrek films, like Sonic the Hedgehog. It was pivotal that I saw this on the big screen.There’s almost too much to admire here. This is a textbook example of how to take a flawed, overly confident character and make them the star of your show. Puss is arrogant and full of himself but never unlikeable due to how funny, daring, and charming he is. On top of that, after its first big set-piece, the film takes time to humble him quickly by setting him up against one of the most intense and terrifying antagonists in a family film this side of Shrek’s gritty fairy tale land. He is a wolf in a black parka and his name is Death.Death as a character hits all the marks one would need him to hit for the concept behind his involvement to land. It does so in ways that are so subtle that some of them had to be discovered by the internet later on. Yeah, he was in the crowd watching as Puss was about to frivolously sacrifice one of his nine lives again for the thrill of being called a legend. The red in his eyes, the relentless chase, the song he whistles, the SHIFT in tone from whatever is happening on screen to the personal tone he exudes due to his mere presence are all immaculate. He commands attention and is deserving of it because none can escape him and the film wants you to know it.Death being a thing you can’t escape is something we all, of course, know and something we all need to grapple with at some point in our lives. It’s harder to do some days than it is on other days though. As we grow older I find myself looking at my parents and with each hug and fun afternoon we have together I can’t help but take an ominous glance towards the future where I’ll know they’ll be gone. I’ve found myself giving them both a hug and saying to myself “They’re still here” before heading off to work.One day they won’t be and it’s tough to wrestle with that knowledge the further and further into the future I get. However, as Puss found out, it truly is about appreciating the life that you do have. Never stop fighting for the life you do have. Living in the moment does not mean throwing caution to the wind and tossing yourself off a building to see if you’ll survive. It means embracing the here and now so that when it’s all over you won’t leave any regrets behind.Inevitably, there will be some. That’s the nature of the human mind but it’s definitely better to try for something that’ll improve it than to shrug and say you may as well not because we’ll all die anyway. As sad and scary as it may sound, death gives life purpose. The life you lead is shaped by the knowledge of inevitable demise.The fact that this is something being expertly explored and talked about in a sequel to Puss in Boots has, again, left all other films with no excuse not to try. The themes don’t just begin and end with death of course. Family is another big bullet point in this film as one of the key motivators for why living life is more important than just having a bunch of lives to stave off death. Finding and living for someone you can trust and call family helps give that life purpose. It’s what the main female lead, Kitty Softpaws, played by Salma Hayek Pinault, wants so desperately out of her life.The last wish could grant her that but she began to realize along her journey that she could have that in Puss, as the journey changed him to finally be the kind of person she needed. Meanwhile, the heart of the film, a dog named Perrito, played by Harvey Guillén, is someone who knew this from birth. Kinship, kindness, and looking on the bright side of life is his M.O to an absurd and cartoonish degree. However, because it’s cranked up past 11 for him, it sells us hard on what he believes and how strongly he believes it. It’s to the point where he finds amusement in his backstory where he was tossed into a river inside of a sock with a rock in it by his former family. No one else would find that story funny and the last person that should be is him but in his point of view he got a neat sweater out of it so it was a win-win.Of course, even if Perrito is the heart of the film, the subplot that got my heart to ache the most was the one involving Goldilocks and the three bears. Goldie, played by Florence Pugh, and her family played by Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone, and Samson Kayo respectively, are one of the prongs of folks after the wishing star and they embody the spirit of found family to a tee. Mama Bear was making me cry the most with the way she kept responding to Goldie’s advances, especially towards the end. It’s a heartwarming story about how the thing you’re looking for your whole life is often, sometimes already within your grasp. As someone who isn't immune to ignoring the happiness he’s seeking staring him in the face, it's been taxing coming to grips with how hard it can be to realize this. A book Goldie reads literally tells her what she wants if you pause the film and read the first letters of each sentence down the side like a crossword puzzle. The third prong after the star is the internet’s favorite balloon boy of wistful evil, Jack Horner, played by John Mulaney. The poem that inspired him tells of Little Jack Horner sitting in a corner, eating a horner pie. He stuck his thumb in a plum and said “oh what a good boy am I”.Except, he very much is not. His wicked machinations make him an exceedingly entertaining villain and one that cleared the drought for many online looking for a good bad guy to hate again.It feels like it’s been well over a decade or so since we’ve had a villain quite like this in an animated feature and while I’m sure others do exist, it’ll be hard for them to top the kind of vigor and swagger this one has from merely taking a step on screen and smirking in the precise, devilish way he did. When it comes to the other best villains I can think of in animated features as of late, characters like Ernesto de la Cruz from Coco and Tamatoa from Moana come to mind but there are huge caveats associated with both of them that hold them back. Neither of them are in the film for anywhere near as long as Jack Horner is because the structure of the stories in those films didn’t allow for them to be. It makes sense that it felt so refreshing having a character like Jack come along.It really was just nice to have an unapologetically evil, repugnant roach for a villain again. The fun that comes with loving to hate this guy breathes such new life into a movie going experience when, of course, you’re surrounded by flawed but mostly well-meaning characters on a journey to legitimately better themselves. This man, on the other hand, is responsible for all his men dying in terrible, gruesome ways and he simply does not care. All he wants is the wish that comes with recovering the coveted wishing star and no matter what Kevin McCann’s talking Cricket, an accidental companion on his personal journey here, tries to do or say the horrors that lie in that cold dead heart of Jack’s prevails in the end. Until it doesn’t.The film didn’t need to excuse Jack being an irredeemable monster but the fact that they went the extra mile by letting the audience know they knew what they were doing by having the cricket be a double act with Jack for the majority of the film shows the kind of talent we’re dealing with here. It is also true to life. Some people are just privileged and use that privilege to do awful things to people for no other reason than indulging in yet more selfish desire.This film is special. It came out during a year of film where so much creativity felt lost or hindered either by studio meddling or a perceived lack of ambition. Scrounging for scraps and suffering through Disney’s inane attempts to remain relevant in the 2020s was making things feel hopeless. The fact that this film is as good as it is really does put it all into perspective for me though.It’s not about sequels. It’s not about remakes. It’s not about franchises. It’s not even about live-action.We bemoan and complain whenever any of those get announced but all of them have the capacity to be good so long as they’re being made with the intention of creating something good and having something to say rather than to just make money. If a film is good, made on a reasonable budget, and it’s well advertised, it’ll make money. The power of word of mouth is something not to be underestimated in this day in age. We’ve seen too many stories of success that come from a verbal boost of positivity to deny it.Once again, this film is a masterpiece of work and even if money was the driving force behind why it was greenlit it definitely was not the driving force behind the process of its creation. My wish is for all movies to be like this one. Not literally but figuratively. I want them all to strive for casting a bright light that shines its full potential on the world no matter what kind of film it is.
Shrek
Revisiting this film and trying to review it almost feels like a strange thing to do when you stop and think about it. The sensation this film pioneered and what it managed to do for the film industry as a whole, let alone Dreamworks, makes it nearly impossible to feel as though any critique leveled at it has any real meaning. Despite that, there is a lot of merit to looking back at an old film and analyzing not only why it was successful but what it meant for Dreamworks then and comparing it to where the company is now.Shrek is a film that was created almost entirely out of spite for the Disney Corporation and despite that it’s filled to the brim with a shocking amount of heart. The spite former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg had for the company lives on in a film that revels in stark contrast to the kind of films Disney were traditionally making at the time.Going back to this film it really did surprise me just how much about what it molded into pop culture still holds up within the context of the film itself. The story of this ogre, voiced iconically by Mike Myers, who lives in a world populated by fairy tale creatures who just wants to live alone in his unabashedly gross and disgusting swamp remains insanely charming to this day.The characters are still great. In fact, I think I may have underestimated how good they were, namely Princess Fiona, played by Cameron Diaz. She’s an excellent character and one that’s extremely easy to endear yourself to. Watching her unknowingly eat a fried rat with an ogre and claim it’s delicious and then not bat an eye when she’s informed as to what it is just kind of puts a smile on your face. She starts out feeling like she’s trapped herself in this idea that she needs to adhere to the usual Disney script surrounding how these princess rescue situations usually go but it’s not played off as her being annoying. She’s just caught up in her own fanciful imagination. It doesn’t take long at all for her to warm up to Shrek and Donkey and because of her personality it’s easy to believe. The personality she does have was at odds with who she was pretending to be and Shrek was the person she needed to meet in order to bring that out of her.Speaking of Donkey, that’s another character who surprised me. When the film started I was worried he was going to annoy me now that I was older but I started to realize that what makes Donkey, brought to life by Eddie Murphy, actually really endearing is the fact that he’s someone who genuinely lacks proper social skills. Every word out of his mouth is either him inquisitively asking about the hows and whats of the world or him galavanting about how the importance of connections and friendship makes everyone a better person. He comes off as a child rather than Eddie Murphy just chewing the scenery to say whatever random funny thing he can think of.Shrek himself needs no introduction. He is an internet meme for a reason. He knows what he’s about and he wears it on his sleeve. He’s a nice guy who has banished himself from society because society has banished him from a fair chance at being loved for who he is. That idea of becoming a monster because society treats you like a monster is something that’ll be explored more in depth in Dreamworks’ Megamind but it works well enough here. What ends up being a shame about how well this film did are, of course, all the pretenders and copycats that injected pop culture with misunderstandings as to why aspects of this film work the way they do. Most films that copied aspects of what was in Shrek simply didn’t copy them correctly. The dance ending, while it may have happened before this film, became a huge staple in children’s media partly because of this. It didn’t really matter that it was appropriate for this film and the tone it was trying to set. It utilized music in a way that was supposed to be the opposite of how the usual Disney fare does. It was definitely intentional that fairy tale creatures were dancing in tandem to Smash Mouth’s “I’m a Believer” at the end. That wasn’t put there because they randomly wanted a song to close out the film like it would often feel like with a lot of other animated movies.While I’ve never actually had a problem with the animated dance ending troupe, I can at least recognize why other people don’t like it. There’s so little understanding or appreciation for context in them. Hotel Transylvania is a fine film but it only ended with Adam Sandler’s Dracula rapping on stage because that’s the way films like it tended to end by that point.There’s not even a lot of pop songs in this film. It has two Smash Mouth songs and at one point it plays Bad Reputation. The only other song I recall them playing is Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and that definitely is not a pop song. Shockingly, the film still looks good. It looks really good actually. You can certainly tell it’s a little rough around the edges in some places but it held up upon repeat viewing in 2023.If I had any criticisms I felt were worth talking about, one of them would be that John Lithgow and his performance as the villainous Lord Farquaad isn’t in it enough. He’s hilarious every time he’s on screen but because the plot is what it is it means he can’t be in it often. The movie only works because he sent the ogre off to get the princess for him. That’s fine. I’m naturally just going to want to see more of a really good, really well voice-acted villain even if I can’t personally find a way to fit them in more often in a natural way. This is less of a criticism and more of a fleeting wish.Other than that, really, it’s mostly just a well done, simple story at the end of the day. Its placement on this list isn’t a statement on there being too many things wrong with it. Films in Dreamworks catalog just undoubtedly go above and beyond what this film does and that includes other films within the Shrek franchise. Those films might even have more flaws than this one does but the good might just outway the bad in ways that the original Shrek can’t compete with.It earns its place here as a staple of what it did for cinema as a fine, well told simple story with a twist. Nowadays, so much more has been achieved on the back of this film’s accomplishments and that’s a good thing.
The Bad Guys
The Bad Guys is a film that really benefited from a second watch. For someone like me who has seen a lot of films, the premise of a group of bad guys who are good at being bad and eventually become good is an age old tale at this point and I felt, and still feel, that the narrative the film incorporates doesn’t do a lot to differentiate it from those other ones. The most I can say in its favor as far as how different it feels is in its style and the fact that the friction is carried by the dynamic of the group rather than in just a single individual.Full disclosure, when I first saw this film I thought it was okay. I didn’t really care about it that much. I heard it was a fantastic film so I went in with expectations that were supremely high and came out of it feeling as though I must have missed something important. The typical nature of the story and the two twists that I predicted near the very beginning of the film left me feeling rather disappointed after all the hype. Then, I left the movie alone for a bit and came back to it for this list and I was grateful that I did. This movie is actually pretty good.I think the reason this film benefits so much from a rewatch if you’re someone like me is that when watching it again, knowing the twists and knowing what it was going for beforehand, I was able to appreciate all the other stuff about it that I didn’t give the correct amount of attention to before. There’s a lot to be said about how a film can tell a simple story but stand out with an outstanding amount of atmosphere and an incredible use of music.
The film begins in a way that’s way cooler and more impressive than I remembered, with two of our main bad guys, Wolf (Sam Rockwell) and Snake (Marc Maron), just talking to each other in a diner. The casual conversation they have is funny because the reaction they get from the people around them is the polar opposite of their current mood. The characters and the dialogue are solid. They’re all designed really well, they’re acted really well, and the heists and the way they’re presented do give off the feel of a child friendly Lupin the 3rd.One thing I did notice the first time I watched but didn’t heap nearly enough praise onto before was the animation. Namely, the style of the movie coupled with the animation is where this film truly shines. It is the absolute best thing about it. It simply looks gorgeous. It looks like the kind of stylized cartoon that I’ve wanted to see from 3D animated films for a long time now.Spider-Verse kicked off this trend and every film that comes after utilizes the same techniques to boost itself an entire letter grade. The same old tired look of the Illumination films with the Minions just doesn't cut it anymore.The second thing I failed to acknowledge before was the music. The music is very inspired. From the needle drop choices to the original background tracks to the original song they sing in the middle of the film. It’s full of that old time jazz beat that exudes style. It’s basically pelting you across the face with how slick and cool it is.As a work of art, this is definitely a well crafted film. Unfortunately, despite finding a new love and passion for what it is, I do find that the originality in some of the story-telling departments it ventures into holds it back. Despite being fun, it’s still just a little too simple for me, personally.
I think that’s largely due to the most predictable of the two twists and, for me, the worst part of this film; the villain.
Professor Marmalade, played gleefully by Richard Ayoade, is another one of those twist villains that everyone hates seeing in films nowadays. I usually don’t have a problem with them so long as they’re good and their villainy being a twist actually enhances the story in a cool way. However, this isn’t like Coco where everything gets turned on its head and the trepidation meter rises to 11. I saw this coming a mile away and the only thing it really does is get the Bad Guys put away like they were originally going to be at the beginning of the film.It seems like it was widely just a vehicle for the others to have cute scenes of character development and attempts at being good, which was necessary, but due to it being in service of this boring villain’s stale plot, it feels a little like it’s going through the motions.The cop lady, Misty Luggins (Alex Borstein) was a fun enough addition though she could get to be a little much in some places. There is a thin line between being a fun antagonist and being an antagonist that gets in the way of the fun. She almost crossed it but never quite does, thankfully.The Bad Guys are the Good Guys now and yet, somehow, there’s going to be a Bad Guys 2. Are they going to go back to being The Bad Guys in a story so tragic it’ll make the kids cry or is it going to be like Despicable Me where Gru turns from a villain into a slightly grumpy, vindictive neighbor? I suppose we’ll see but the idea that it could go beyond something as generic as what they did to Mr. Minions is hard to imagine, unfortunately. At the very least, it’ll do what it does with the style and grace that those movies could only wish they had.
Penguins of Madagascar
There’s a lot to be said about films that exist just to be dumb fun and I go up to bat for them a lot. However, the difference between something like this and the other Madagascar films is that there is a lot about them that feels genuine in terms of character writing and heart that a lot of people just did not appreciate at the time of their initial release. They were popular with kids but film reviewers tended to stick their noses up at movies like them for indulging in slapstick comedy rather than being another heart shattering exploration of the human psyche like most Pixar films were at the time.
As great as those can be, never let it be said that comedy in cartoons isn’t something to be celebrated. The jokes were really well thought out and the problems that the characters had, ranging from the fear of going feral when being returned to the wild or being scared of doing an incredibly strange circus act, were all very interesting and hard not to be enamored by.
They were films that, over time, embraced how goofy and weird they were without withdrawing from character development based on true flights of extremely odd fancy.
This movie is not like those movies. This was a film that was made to capitalize on the popularity of the Penguins from Madagascar and that is it.
The Penguins in Madagascar were a fun group of side-characters from the first Madagascar film that acted as special agent... penguins. They had no real affiliation with any spy organization. They just acted like secret agents because it was funny. The joke landed because it was novel and unexpected. The writing and acting helped sell it to the audience too. They were a hit and became popular enough that they got their own film and later their own television show.
This sort of thing tends to happen often. Usually, it would be a disastrous thing to do because the point of comedic relief is to provide relief from the serious nature of the story being told. As a result, most of the more popular characters were the comedic relief. Sometimes it managed to work when you had a solid enough duo that could sell the comedy of a situation without being overbearing and annoying. The dynamic Timon and Pumbaa from the Lion King had was a great example of that. Their comedy didn’t come from acting crazy and off the wall all the time. One was a schemer and the other was slightly dull headed but charming in his own way. They worked well together.
The penguins are in a similar boat. Their gimmick was funny in a way that didn’t require them to be bouncing off the walls or screeching at the poor adults who came to the theaters to give their children a good time. The suave demeanor of their leader, Skipper (Tom McGrath), and the varied personalities of the others ranging from the straight faced Kowalski (Chris Miller), the silent but unhinged Rico (Conrad Vernon), and the adorable and well meaning Private (Christopher Knights) gave the four of them a group dynamic that could have made for a very interesting film.
I hear the show managed to capitalize on that very well but this film did not.
I got nothing out of watching this film. It’s not funny. It’s not painfully unfunny but its jokes just aren’t very catchy. There’s maybe one or two jokes I laughed at and the rest I just thought were cute. There’s a running joke where the main villain of this film, Dave the Octopus (John Malkovich), keeps calling the names of his henchmen in differently structured sentences that when put together make the name of a celebrity. He’ll say things like “Nicolas, Cage them!” and “Kevin! Bake on. We’re still gonna need that victory cake!” and I found that cute.
It’s never funny. It was just cute.
However, I do feel like the villain, Dave, and the humor surrounding him, is indicative of the kind of film this is. Everything about him right down to his name is soaked in tired old jokes you’ve heard before. He shows up dressed as a human doctor before the Penguins he’s kidnapped and then dramatic music plays as he reveals his name is Dave.
It’s that joke you’ve heard a million times before where the threatening bad guy has the least threatening name you can think of. They then immediately follow that up with a joke about the Penguins not remembering who he is because, while he knows them, they don’t know him. His backstory makes that clear because they’ve never met but he has a grudge against them because he was an attraction at the Zoo that kids loved… and then the Penguins showed up and stole his thunder. Apparently, the fact that the penguins were cute was considered Dave’s fault and the Zoo shipped him away because he was no longer being looked at. We’re told this happened at every single zoo he was transferred to.
He’s sad, alone, and full of rage because he’s been treated like an unloved loser all his life for literally no reason. Still, despite this, he’s managed to find a seemingly endless cavalcade of other octopi whom he remembers all the names of. Looking at the army he’s amassed it seems like he’s found the love and respect he’s been looking for finally but the movie never acknowledges this. I guess those earlier years of being neglected warped his mind into not being able to recognize what companionship is. I can only guess because it’s never stated.
He tries to get revenge on all the penguins of the world by turning them into monsters and sicking them on the humans to make them hate all penguins.
You can’t really feel sorry for him unfortunately. Not because his backstory is cliche (it is) but also because he found something that should make him happy now and he’s just vindictive despite that. The film sometimes seems like it wants you to feel for him but not really? It’s a bit too back and forth for me to be completely sure what they’re going for. He’s animated really well at least.
They also do the other joke you’ve heard of before where Skipper can’t remember Dave’s name even though it’s not a hard name to remember at all. It’s not like they have Skipper learn much here anyway. The lesson he has to learn is to just respect the Private a little more than he has and that’s it.
The movie’s primary focus is the Private as it begins with them all saving him and watching him hatch as children during a segment where the filming of a nature documentary is taking place. It’s the one inspired joke in the film and it was also something I thought of right before it happened. You see Penguins waddling in a line in Antarctica, you think of nature documentaries.
Side note, they were born in Antarctica and thought it was boring and left. In the first Madagascar movie they were trying to escape the zoo because being there wasn’t natural and they wanted to go to “the wild” and headed to Antarctica but also thought it was boring and went to Madagascar instead. They were young so maybe they forgot but the movie makes it seem like they didn’t. They flash back to their humble beginnings when Skipper is mulling over how he’s failed the private by allowing him to get captured. It’s just an example of how expanding the lore of these characters sometimes leads to inconsistencies with what’s already been established, especially if you’re only making this film because the penguins are popular.
The underdog story of the Private proving to Skipper and the others that he should be respected leads to him saving them all and showing them that he can do it too, whatever “it” is. It shares the screen with a side-plot about the Penguins being helped by a group of animals that run an elite intelligence agency known as the North Wind. It’s led by Classified the Wolf (Benedict Cumberbatch), Corporal the Polar Bear (Peter Stormare), Short Fuse the Seal (Ken Jeong), and Eva the Snowy Owl (Annet Mahendru).
These characters exist to have an ego measuring contest with the Penguins and soften Skipper’s self-important nature a bit. Granted, Classified has a much bigger ego than Skipper’s due to being surrounded by much more grandiose and hi-tech stuff. They put themselves forth as the professionals in this situation but come off as a little incompetent due to being constantly thwarted by the Penguins’ attempts to disrupt them. There certainly are times where they prove themselves superior to them but not really enough to make them feel super relevant to what’s going on. They barely have a part to play in the climax as a result.
Their existence also just kind of rings a little too hollow and far-fetched. Considering what happens in the Madagascar series that sounds like I’m saying a lot but the absurdity of the series always felt like it was rooted in the wackiness of these animals bleeding into a world that was trying to be normal but failing. That was always part of the fun for me.
For example, Shantel Dubois, the main villain in the third film, was acting like a terminator but the joke was that she was doing all these action hero stunts with the simple goal of catching and killing a lion by utilizing her skills as a member of animal control.
It was an animal control agent that was doing all that nonsensical stuff and it was hilarious and crazy in a good way. When you wipe away the barrier between real life and cartoons and just say that animals can run a secret intelligence agency with hi-tech gadgets and don’t offer an explanation or reason to sell the joke (if it’s supposed to even be a joke) then it doesn’t work. It just feels as though they’re being lazy. There’s nothing inventive about it. It feels like something that would be better fit in a sequel to Zootopia. Sure, Madagascar takes place in a world where the animals are cartoonish, outlandish, and do impossible, weird things but they're supposed to still technically be regular zoo animals. It feels as though they forgot that.
The penguins breaking into Fort Knox just to steal Cheesy Dibbles from a vending machine is the kind of thing I came here to see. I still don’t entirely know or get how Dave was able to amass all the stuff he’s got and the movie was never interested in explaining that away with a joke because it would have probably required being too clever.
At the end of the day, this was a film I watched and it’s the first one of the Dreamworks films that felt like a stretched out pilot for a TV show. That said, people really like the TV show that was made for the Penguins after this so at least this led to some good for somebody down the line.
Spirit Untamed
There is one good scene in this film and it’s when Snips, the little brother of a side-character named Abigail, is trying to sell the main character, Lucky, a donkey ride on his silly, dinky little donkey like a taxi for a penny. Then Abigail rides in and hogties him and leaves him in the middle of the road. She does it again in the middle of the movie but this time hangs him upside down inside a barn tied to his donkey. It was an amusing thing to witness in a film that’s extremely bereft of excitement or fun.Nothing happens in this film. This was an incredibly boring experience. I almost fell asleep twice watching this inane garbage. I didn’t even know Spirit: Stallion of the Semeron had a sequel until I saw this film on the Dreamworks Animation Productions list as I was making my way through all of their projects. Initially, I was worried that it was going to do something to make me unequivocally hate it for ruining the first film. However, this film is too cowardly and has precisely nothing to say. It couldn’t even dream of leaving such a lasting impression as that.The original Spirit is a phenomenal film that manages to create a beautiful atmosphere with breathtaking animation to illustrate the simple story of a gallant and brave horse trying to escape the bonds of humanity so that he can return to the wild with his family. I’m grateful this film didn’t have a hand in tarnishing the memory of that previous movie but I also find myself regretting that its inaction has left me with so little to talk about. It’s just a film about everyone being absolutely right about a disruptive, accident prone little girl until the end of the film where she is apologized to for going on an insane trip to rescue some horses from the world’s most boring horse wrangler villain in existence.Her name is Lucky played by Isabela Merced. She’s a spunky young girl who, as a baby, really liked strawberries. I’m relaying this information to you because I’m certain the film really wants to make sure you know this. As unsubtle as it is, the film begins on a bit of a somber note where herself as a baby and her dad are watching her mom perform dangerous tricks on a horse. It’s extremely hard to tell what happened exactly but the clear implication is that she messed up and died in the middle of the show.Years later, she’s living in a mansion with her grandfather who's running for governor. She lets a squirrel into the room and chases it around the mansion and it lands on his face while he has guests over and that causes a huge scandal in the newspaper. The mansion is also destroyed and the table catches fire. Despite the film doing everything in its power to convince you that she’s the put upon person here, it’s hard to get that impression when the things she’s done are so outlandish. She gets sent away with her aunt after this and it’s hard to blame the governor for doing so. Of course, you might also find yourself worrying for the aunt because she also, apparently, sunk her aunt’s entire summer home under water. What does any of this have to do with Spirit? Virtually nothing aside from a single scene where she sees Spirit running outside the back of the train on her way there. The first film was a mostly silent movie because the horse couldn’t speak. There was occasional narration of his thoughts for instances that required it and, eventually, when more human characters entered the story they spoke as well. However, it wasn’t a requirement and it made for a more interesting film.This film is not about Spirit. It’s about this little girl. It’s hard to take that at face value when despite being so destructive and terrible, she’s also extremely uninteresting. The earlier scene with the squirrel, despite being a heinous disaster, was something that felt more like happenstance rather than anything she directly caused. That’s most likely why her name is Lucky. It’s an attempt at being ironic. Realistically, it feels like a confused decision. She sometimes does things that would be considered insane and destructive but at the same time is also just accident prone. It feels as though the film can’t decide if her disasters are her fault or a result of universal bad luck. Either one would have been fine if, whenever she’s not doing these acts of mayhem, she weren’t such a generic, uninteresting title character. Any hints towards her causing more trouble down the line are wiped from the film and forgotten the instant the plot gets going. Her earlier traits feel as though they were plugged in there at the start to give off the quick illusion that she’s quirky so that the audience could maybe, perhaps, identify with her or at least think she’s somewhat interesting. In the end it felt more like an excuse to just say they put in the work so that they could make her incredibly bland for the entire rest of the movie. It was too much work writing an interesting personality for the entire film I imagine.This movie has a plot that feels like it was taken from a plot generator you’d find online. The horses get kidnapped by an evil, horse wrangling cowboy and it’s up to Lucky to save them. She gathers her friends and they go through a canyon to reach a dock where the horses are being led onto a ship and then set them free. The obstacles they face are a long gap they need to jump over and another long gap that has a skinny pathway they need to carefully walk along.Those are the only two obstacles they overcome before they reach their destination.Then we’re at the finale. You’ll probably question the logistics of that considering this is a feature length film and not a twenty minute pilot on Youtube. The movie isn’t concerned with that. It simply stretches out the length of time it takes to focus on these situations to accommodate for that. On top of that, it’s not what the majority of the film focuses on.Perhaps more trials and tribulations could have been experienced had the plot kicked off faster but it takes about a third of the film’s runtime before the adventure these girls go on even kicks off. Lucky spends most of the time in the first third just trying to feed Spirit apples and getting along with her two friends, Abigail and another girl whose name they only say once.Spirit is here too. Yes, remember him? Once again, he’s here but because there’s way more humans this time and he’s not the main character anymore there is no need to insert any of his narration. Despite how long it takes for the plot to get going, he ends up taking a liking to Lucky way faster than he did the other, more charming individual from the first film. That didn’t happen until the very end but here they need to get along quicker so that she can help save his family faster. If the two of them have as little conflict with one another as possible, the main plot can be allowed to limp along without anything thought provoking or challenging happening. It sounds riveting doesn’t it?When they’re saved, the horses ride off and we’re right back where we started with Spirit. It’s nice nothing changed with him and I’m glad the film didn’t ruin his happy ending from the first. This was just a random thing that happened in his life, I suppose. Lucky, the real titular character, doesn’t really learn anything or change either. She goes off on this extremely dangerous, and yet simultaneously extremely boring, journey to save some horses from indistinct bad guys and learns that she was right all along to be as destructive and as reckless as she is. The tension between her and her father, who she’s sent home to for the duration of this film, comes from the fact that he doesn’t like horses and thinks they’re dangerous because her mom died performing dangerous stunts on horses. Her mom used to do backflips off of horses with her eyes closed. The fact that she died from that is the fault of the horses, according to her father.Granted, she only left without telling him because of the tension between them but even if there weren’t any, no self-respecting parent would ever let their kid do this anyway. Plus, the first time she rode Spirit she almost fell off a cliff and died. It felt as though the film was attempting to tell us he initially had a point but considering she’s supposed to be in the right, I suppose not.Is it trying to provide a message to us about trying to save the horses? Does it wish to do so by saying that allowing your daughter near them will accomplish this? I suppose having the main character’s mother’s backstory be that she died from performing backflips off of horses muddies the waters a bit on that message then. It’s better that she nearly falls down a huge canyon or gets killed by poachers. This is a film that while describing it I fear I may be doing a service to it by explaining the plot. It risks creating the illusion that there were indeed things of significance that took place during the viewing. I cannot stress enough how much this wasn’t the case. I’ve gotten more enjoyment out of watching someone sit in a chair and inflate a balloon. This kind of film has been written so often that it has about as much substance as the air that fills those balloons too.I was almost put to sleep by this film and if a good night’s sleep is what you’re looking for then I’d recommend the Youtube app on your phone.