Wreck-It Ralph

In hindsight Wreck-It Ralph is quite an odd film. It’s nostalgic set up concerns video game arcades and characters that will invoke wistful memories for many grown-ups, but will be lost on the majority of kiddies that watch this. However, the youngsters will enjoy the thrilling computer animation, chase sequences and moralistic story. For most adults though these highlights will be standard at best. This is obviously marketed as a family film though I’d say it’s not consistent for either demographic during its running time. In terms of what we do have all the way through is the story of Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly), a computer character in an arcade game who gets tired of playing the villain of the piece day in day out and (plenty of plot machinations later) eventually finds himself in a racing game called Sugar Rush in which he assists Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) in winning a race before everything is destroyed by a load of computer “bugs”. As you can see the plot is hardly all that taxing. Director Rich Moore has a background in The Simpsons and Futurama, but the satirical nature of those gems isn’t really relevant to this type of outing. This is basic stuff in today’s oversubscribed animated genre and it does little to try and make itself stand out amongst the crowd (not helped by its one dimensional main protagonists). The concept of the film was first mooted at Disney towards the end of the 1980’s so for something that’s been around for so long you would have hoped for a bit more script wise. Of course the main thing that has advanced since then is computer and film graphics themselves, so at least the film realises a vision that wouldn’t have been possible back then. On that front, according to Disney this film is the first of theirs to utilise “bidirectional reflectance distribution functions” (no, me neither). This appears to have got great reviews across the board, but to me, especially in the film’s final third, the overload of colours, noise and general mayhem masks the fact that not much is really going on. Overall, if you’re a fan of computer games and their characters from the past 30 or so years, then you’ll have a field day watching this and you’ll probably smugly be enjoying a lot of the visuals gags that most people won’t even spot and / or understand.

The OC Film Sting Final Verdict

Some memories of coin operated games and joysticks aside, the storyline isn’t involving enough for adults. Kids will probably love it though. Rating: 6/10.