Review of Ratchet & Clank (2016) by Brandon W — 12 Apr 2017

Ratchet & Clank is directed and co-written by Kevin Munroe, and it stars the original voice actors that were in the video games, along with celebrities like Paul Giamatti, John Goodman, Bella Thorne, Rosario Dawson, and Sylvester Stallone in a computer animated film about a Lombax named Ratchet (James Arnold Taylor) that wanted to be something greater than what he's doing right now, that is until a robot that's defective ran away from Chairman Drek's place and crash landed on Ratchet, and Clank (David Kaye) is looking for help, which Ratchet thinks is the help Clank is looking for.

I played almost all of the Ratchet & Clank games, so I know a lot of the characters, gameplay, and references, and I was looking forward to the film, until I saw the reviews and got me to not watch the film until it's been on Netflix for a while.

So when I have nothing else better to do, I watch this out of curiosity, and while it's better than some video game adaptations, it's not enough for me to say that it's a solid one either.

The acting is really good, although the celebrity actors are just there except for Paul Giamatti who's having fun with his character. The main characters remain likable enough for me to know them in the film, the villains were really weak that for non-fans of the video game, they would forget about who the villains really are.

The animation is impressive as it looks like the actual video game, and the chemistry between Ratchet and Clank is surprisingly really good that definitely felt like the video games themselves. While I had some chuckles from the easter eggs or some of the jokes, most of the humor is really flat that I didn't even get a smile out of it.

I don't know if the game's story is similar to the movie as I played only the beginning of the reboot game, but the plot in this felt very generic and predictable which I was starting to feel the disappointment in me.

The action doesn't look impressive as it was probably because it doesn't look like the game in terms of the gameplay as Ratchet hasn't got into a battle until the climax, which felt more like the gameplay action and is the best action scene in the film, even if it wasn't great.

Fans of the video game series might like it fine, for non-fans, they won't get confused, but they won't be interested in the film. I can tell that it was trying to be a good movie as it had more effort than the other movies that just don't know how to adapt video games, but it just felt so mediocre that it was close to become a decent flick, but it fell short and makes me rather play the video game instead.