Courtesy Mandeville Films
Oh, good, we’ve reached the post-Wreck it Ralph/Ready Player One era wherein new movies not only spend tons of screen time basically asking millennials if they/we remember this or that character from our childhoods, they’re now lampooning themselves for doing so. One could call this self-aware humor, but one could also call it exhausting, and in the new Andy Samberg/John Mulaney Disney movie Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, it’s hard to tell which.
This movie is 100% aimed at people 35-40 years of age who grew up watching the show of the same name and maybe now have kids (or are still super into cartoons). If you’re not familiar with Rescue Rangers, Disney took those eponymous chipmunks and gave them a detective agency, plus the kinds of co-star characters who furries cite as reasons they find anthropomorphized characters so hot to this day (the other being Disney’s Robin Hood—and no judgement, we love furries here, sincerely).
In the new mostly live action movie, however, we’re told Chip (Mulaney) and Dale (Samberg) are real people in a Who Framed Roger Rabbit sense. Not only that, they’re lifelong friends who met at elementary school. SCHOOL! A SCHOOL!
Worse, in this universe, Rescue Rangers was a show in which they acted, and things went bad after they were canceled. We pick back up with the non-Alvin chipmunks 30 years later as their castmate Monterey Jack (Eric Bana) gets kidnapped, forcing our heroes into some real-life detective work despite their estrangement. Keeping up? It honestly doesn’t matter.
Cue references to Disney things and not-so-Disney things (special nod to comic Tim Robinson as Ugly Sonic, a lambasting of the original design for the blue bomber’s CGI film that drove much of the internet to insanity, resulting in a total re-haul of the character), and a whole mess of weird rules about sizes of things and ages. Some characters age, while others don’t seem to do tha at all. Some phones are huge, and others are chipmunk sized. We’re supposed to believe manufacturers take all that into account?! Naw, just kidding—who cares? Everything is in service of a bit of niche nostalgia, and voice performances from folks like Will Arnett, Tress MacNeille (Futurama), JK Simmons and Seth Rogen do get pretty funny now and then. Samberg’s a treasure, no matter how badly one wants to hate his guts, but Mulaney is not now nor has he ever been a good actor, voice or otherwise, even if he’s proven a capable comic.
But I digress.
Director Akiva Schaffer (he’s one of Samberg’s Lonely Island pals) knows what people in a certain age bracket want when it comes to movies: completely unchallenging pap! That’s what you’re getting here, people who are amazed by things they already know—pap.
5
+Decent animation; a few good laughs
-Please let these nostalgia pieces stop!
Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers
Directed by Schaffer
With Samberg, Mulaney, Bana, Simmons, Arnett and MacNeill
Disney+, PG, 97 min.
