When the inevitable conclusion that sees Swifty achieve his dreams arrives, it’s not so much a hard fought changing of the guard as it is an exercise in frustrated predictability.ĭespite a 90-minute runtime, the movie attempts the Disney school of animation and packs a bunch of original musical numbers – many of which are sung by the voice actors. Instead we literally get Hawkeye in animated trim – overly confident, snide, stubborn, kind of obnoxious. One would think the feel they’d be going for is an underdog with whom we sympathize, maybe even for whom we would feel sorry. This is fine on its own but Jeremy Renner was probably not the best choice for voicing Swifty. The story works on many formulaic institutions, not the least of which is the whole you can be anything you want to be wrapped in a politically driven agenda package. Given the star studded cast, it would seem only a major derailment of writing would be all that could sink this iceberg but in practice- that is only the tip of the, uh, iceberg. To save the ice, Swifty enlists the help of his friends: A polar bear voiced by Alec Baldwin, a neurotic albatross (James Franco), a female fox friend (Heidi Klum), his caribou boss (Anjelica Huston) and so on. The evil walrus, it turns out, commands an army of subservient puffin henchmen and is hatching up a dastardly scheme to melt the ice of the arctic (guess all the hype about climate change in the media never reached his fortress). To prove he has the chops (we’ll forget that he is a fox and not a husky for now), he commandeers one of the sleds and delivers a mysterious package to what turns out to be a hidden fortress belonging to one Otto Von Walrus (John Cleese). Swifty, an arctic fox (Jeremy Renner), works a lowly position in the mailroom of the Arctic Blast Delivery Service, but yearns to be a Top Dog, the Arctic’s heralded husky couriers. Critics lit it up for being uninspired and immature but we’ll take a look at the material itself after a quick summary of the story. And fail Arctic Dogs did, having returned a mere $9-million at the box office against its $50-million production budget. Blame it on countless mediocre theatrical CG comedies before it if you must (looking at you Alpha & Omega and Rock Dog), or perhaps the simple fact that the medium itself is no longer a guarantee for a wonderful piece of cinema and you have the formula for failure. However, by the time of its 2019 theatrical release, Arctic Dogs (aka Arctic Justice or Polar Squad depending on where you live) opened to much more skeptical movie-goers. Pixar and DreamWorks had spoiled audiences with so many consecutive masterpieces that smaller, less inspired films could follow in their footsteps and expect to cash in with audiences by default (think movies like The Nut Job and Free Birds). There was a time a decade ago when use of the CG animated medium coupled to a theatrical release meant automatic success. It’s as if Norm of the North got Another Theatrical ReleaseĪrctic Dogs is that odd film that comes along that doesn’t do anything wrong so much as it fails to do anything memorable.
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