Review of Toy Story 4 (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

Toy story still has some ability to pull the corners of my lips into an involuntary grin.

Keanu Reeves is having his moment in the sun. Again. Wife leaned over to me in the midst of the deluge of Canada puns and said, “Sometimes representation is not pretty.” I will spare you the joke about finally seeing my own kind represented by Forky. In the meantime, worth saying that Key and Peele have quite a few jokes and maybe my favorite gag of the night, which made the six or seven other people at the movie at 4pm on a Tuesday laugh out loud as it played out.

Bo Peep and Woody’s chemistry on screen is palpable, so much so that it’s hard to gauge why Tim Allen assented to play second banana to Tom Hanks in this sequel. It feels, a Friend told me last night before Friend and Wife went today, like the Gang’s role has been greatly diminished in this iteration. He also said that after having watched this film, he was curious to see if TS 1 and 2 were available on demand and he ended up seeing all three preceding films in order for the rest of the night.

Generally, I’m happy with the plot structure (though Friend said that it leaned a little hard on the Lost Toy Rescue trope before resolving in an unusual way), and I like what’s been done with Bo Peep’s character arc, her challenge to the role of the toy. One of my favorite reviewers on Slate, Inkoo Kang has an article about how Bo Peep “escapes the curse of the feminized sequel”–worth reading. And officially too many people are thinking about the implications that Forky has on the sentience of toys more broadly.

One glaring plot point that Wife also picked up on is that the villain of this film seems to be given a free pass after all of the kidnapping and organ thieving she does to accomplish her selfish goals.