Checked out the new movie Trolls based, more-or-less, on the classic ugly toys with the big hair. More-or-less because these don’t look like the ugly trolls from the 80s and 90s (and earlier) but maybe they’ve been revamped when I wasn’t looking or caring.
Regardless, this is a mediocre movie that no one with two digits in their age should see unless you are dragging along a small human with one digit in their age. And, even then, at least one of these tiny humans was having more fun running laps around the movie theater I was in instead of watching the flick. The kid was probably more entertaining than the movie.
Anyhow, this movie has the basic plot of the Smurfs in that tiny forest creatures are constantly being hunted by much larger beings who want to eat them. And they both want to sell toys. In this case, a bunch of party-time Trolls are trying to avoid large, generically-designed ogres (sorry, “bergen”) who can only feel happy once they eat a troll. Some trolls are captured, other trolls have to free them. The plot is dense and confusing, as you can tell.
I’ll give this movie credit – it has some weird-ass humor and asides. It makes me realize they knew this was an overly sacharine movie otherwise… unfortunately, I didn’t find even the weird stuff funny enough to counterbalance the rest of it.
This movie is also a jukebox musical – it has tons of covers of songs from the 60s-80s like Sounds of Silence and True Colors. plus some recent songs like, oh, you know, Can’t Stop the Feeling from Justin Timberlake (the song written to sell this movie). Some of these covers were ok and were clearly inserted to perk up the bored adults and/or sell the album.
There is one moment set to True Colors that was actually kind of nice and touching in this movie. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie doesn’t earn this touching moment since everything else is random, spastic, weird, and so low attention-span that you can’t just pause the movie to have a touching moment. Least not in my grouchy book.
So, yeah, why did I see this? Well, the reviews has been pretty positive and I missed Storks because I thought it looked like it was written for babies yet it too got good scores. So I thought maybe I’ve just been in a sour and grumpy mood… and while that is partly true, I also think this movie is really only aimed at kiddies. Especially in a world with The Lego Movie, Inside Out, and Zootopia which appeal to kids but have denser stories and messages that can appeal to teens and adults.
Score: 63