Review of Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (2018) by Hector V — 22 Aug 2018

It's easy to hate on Cartoon Network's Teen Titans Go! for being an overtly silly reboot of a beloved, surprisingly mature cartoon series. Even though it's skewed towards a younger audience, the cartoon can often score solid laughs if one is able to embrace its irreverent style of comedy. The full-length feature film Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, however, is an inexcusably lazy, unfunny continuation that comes across as more of a cheap cash-grab than a fully-fledged superhero movie or cartoon.

Every sugary sweet piece of juvenile appeal imaginable has been thrown at the wall, yet none of it seems to stick. While the film is colorful, it looks no better than the already budgeted animation used on the television program. Some random (the word of the day for the film's humor, story, and stylistic choices) music numbers pop up strangely frequently and give the film some much-needed visual flourishes, but their songs aren't particularly catchy or creative.

This goes for Teen Titans' sense of humor as well. The film mostly relies on random, throwaway humor that never manages to elicit even the smallest of chuckles, largely in part to its appeals towards a juvenile demographic. When it's not blatantly playing towards this crowd, the film also has some off-putting, nasty humor that wouldn't feel out of place in the purely adult It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which this author actually adores). In an overall edgier piece, this sort of comedy would have worked more than well, but in this film, it clashes with its younger audience skew.

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is just overall brainless. It takes forever to really start due to its slog of an intro and a series of digressive, unrelated sequences that pad out its earlier narrative. The Titans battle a balloon-themed supervillain in a bloated introduction, attend an embarrassing premiere to Batman's newest movie, use time machine tricycles to go back in time and save some of DC's superheroes from their tragic origins, then intentionally cause them again. Then, the main narrative finally starts as the Titans meet movie producer Jade Wilson and the big bad, Slade Wilson (both wonderfully played by Kristen Bell and Will Arnett, respectively, just underwritten for their talent).

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is a joyless mess not intended for adults or children. It plays too dumb, which is inexcusable given how farcical, yet surprisingly deep and humorous a film like The Lego Batman Movie turned out to be.