Review of Missing Link (2019) by Brunovn00 — 11 Oct 2019

The guys at Laika have pretty much perfected stop motion so much that it basically looks like stylized CGI. Missing Link is gorgeous in the visual aspect. The CGI is so smooth and the visual effects so breathtaking that, like I said, it seriously looks like regular CGI, even though it's stop motion.

Pretty much like a reverse Lego Movie (that movie looked like stop motion but was CGI). Unfortunately, the hours and hours spent on meticulously crafting every single frame of this amazing-looking movie feel like they were completely wasted, because Laika seems to not give a sh*t about its own movies, thus giving barely any marketing and as a consequence, bombing at the box office.

They keep making less and less money and not even with celebrities names attached (like Hugh Jackman and Zach Galifkakfdjag however it's spelled) this movie could make any money. It's a shame. But even worse, the animators also wasted their time because the story is so bland and formulaic.

If you have seen another movie where a human meets a rare creature, becomes friends and has to prevent the creature from getting captured by the villains, you've seen this movie. It has so many predictable elements, clichés and plot conveniences worse than those found in Kubo.

The characters are not compelling and underdeveloped. No character seem to grow or have an arc, the only character that feels that there was effort in its development is Mr. Link, because he is the only one who kinda learns something at the end.

The villains feel so weak and are even pointless, like you could remove them from the story and make some other character (not gonna spoil anything) the main villain. Great movies are those that you can't think of anything to improve them, but here, I was constantly thinking about how the story and characters could've been better, and that's not good.

This feels a lot more childish than previous Laika movies, thus lacking any depth in the story, any complex themes that you could understand better as an adult. There's some good comedy though, but most of the humor is predictable fish-out-of-water stuff and slapstick.

Don't get me wrong, it was still a pretty enjoyable movie, but it is hard to deny that it feels so standard and uninspired, it's more of a "popcorn" movie. Honestly this was really disappointing.

I don't know how could they made a movie worse than Kubo, I really wanted to give this movie a chance.