Review of Turbo (2013) by Thegodfatherson — 16 Jul 2013

There's nothing overtly wrong with Dreamworks Animation's slick (from snail slime) new summer kid-pleaser, but for a movie about a speed-obsessed snail who just go with it enters the Indy 500, it sure does sit there. It's easy, formulaic and light on laughs. But, for those dragged to see it by children, it won't make you want to rub salt in your eyes. So it's a faint fail or a faint pass, depending on your resilience. Ryan Reynolds voices Theo aka "Turbo" a snail inexplicably determined to be as fast as a Nascar racer. As if you could hear it coming straight out of a pitch meeting. "Wouldn't it be funny if a snail wanted to be fast? Because they're so slow!" Paul Giamatti plays Turbo's "isn't the life we have just fine?" brother, Chet, who mostly shouts things like "It's not natural!" and "That's not what Mother Nature had in mind!" at Turbo so much that you come to realize, after 10 minutes, that the villain in this film is reality. And after endless bickering between a sourpuss and an contrived dreamer, you begin to resent both sides of the argument. In fact, and this is where I'll lose some of you (but it's where my mind goes when I'm bored during a kids' movie), there's a struggling LGBT undercurrent to whole story. Especially when it comes to how much Turbo wants to desperately change who he is as a creature entirely. And, subsequently, how much he's told that he's wrong for wanting to be something different. You get relentlessly beaten about the head by both sides of the fence so much that after a while you have to clear the cobwebs and remember that you're watching a stunt-casted cartoon flick.

From there the story plays out as predictably as possible, leaving little room for surprise or inspiration. Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop Dogg (Lion?) and Maya Rudolph play members of Turbo's rag-tag daredevil snail crew as the movie tries its hardest to convince you that a super-powered snail is somehow the underdog in a racing sport, despite the fact that he's already vastly superior simply by being a supernatural "thing that should not be." A chemical has, in fact, enhanced his performance.