Bolt is an anomaly among this year’s crop of major computer animated children’s films, as it’s not from Pixar (Wall-E) or Dreamworks (Kung Fu Panda), but rather from the Walt Disney Animation Studios, which has only had two such films in its entire history.
Bolt is the story of the titular superdog, voiced by John Travolta, who doesn’t realize he’s not super at all, but rather the special effects assisted co-star of a primetime TV show. Bolt and his person (“master” is apparently no longer PC, so expect to hear a lot of “But I have to save her, she’s my person!”) Penny (Miley Cyrus, a.k.a. Hannah Montana) are constantly in danger of falling into the evil clutches of the green-eyed man (Malcolm McDowell, Star Trek Generations) and his army of nefarious cat-themed henchmen. Of course, when shooting for the day is over, Penny just wants to take him home to lead a normal dog life, but the director refuses to let Bolt break character. Fate intervenes and Bolt, confusing a two-part cliffhanger for real life, goes on a journey cross-country to find Penny and rescue her. Joining forces with Mittens the alley cat and Rhino, a hamster in a ball, hilarity subsequently ensues.
Well, not as much hilarity as I’d like. See, the movie is at it’s best when it’s making fun of itself. Take for example the opening so-over-the-top-it-would-make-Chuck-Norris-cry action sequence which has a lot of randomly manifesting black helicopters and an ending where Bolt destroys their entire battalion in a single “Super Bark.” It pokes fun at the Hollywood style with its overly serious music and opening credits and its commitment to showing that, no matter how dangerous things get, our heroes were never really in danger at all.
But that was funny exactly once. Apparently, someone decided that animating action scenes was so much fun that they had to keep putting our heroes in danger to justify doing just one more. It’s kind of hypocritical, though, when they just spent 10 minutes explaining to us why these scenes are stupid, irrelevant and always, always, always get in the way of telling a story if you overdo it.
Maybe I’d be more game for them if the lead were even slightly less annoying, but since he’s convinced that he’s a superdog on a mission for the first two-thirds of the film, he becomes pretty aggravating when he beats up on the poor, starved cat for the umpteenth time because, if one cat is evil, surely the entire race must be evil too.
Hooray for equality!
The hamster doesn’t help either, since all he does is stroke Bolt’s massive, seething ego. Eventually Bolt figures out what’s what, but for awhile I didn’t have anyone to root for, save a character purposely written as a self-absorbed actor type.
For all that, however, it’s a very funny movie fairly frequently, and if you’re 10 years younger than me it’ll probably be the bestest thing everest! Even if you’re my age, though, you won’t suffer a shortage of good laughs, but it’s comedy, action and story are frequently relegated to their own corners of the movie and obstinately refuse to talk to each other. So an action scene will be kind of important to the story and kind of funny, but it’ll focus more on action than anything else. And so on and forth.
It’s a kid’s movie that certainly won’t waste your time, but up against this year’s titans Kung Fu Panda and Wall-E, it’s just not up to snuff.
