Arctic Justice (2019) - Movie Review

 

Expecting quality control from a talking animal movie nowadays is like asking for the world to start making sense: Most of us would appreciate it, but the chances of it actually happening seem to keep shrinking with each passing day. The latest effort in this undermined subgenre is yet another piece of disposable product designed to be shipped directly to the bargain bin, but this seems to be yet another new variety of bad, even compared to the films I’ve already covered on here. It’s not just bad; it is so lacking in quality control that it can’t even maintain consistency in its badness. And no, that doesn’t mean that it occasionally stumbles into competency. It just means that it goes from bad to a different kind of bad and back again.

The lack of consistency begins with the voice cast, full of name-brand actors who should be better than resorting to this kind of production and who are all noteworthy for entirely the wrong reasons. Jeremy Renner as the lead Swifty fails to raise above the utter cliché that is his character, Alec Baldwin likely only signed on for this because it has an environmental message behind it, and Anjelica Huston makes bank with yet another wacky Eastern European accent. Then there’s Heidi Klum as Swifty’s love interest, whose accent keeps slipping in literally every scene she’s in, John Cleese as the villainous walrus on robo-legs whose strained delivery is impossible to overlook, and James Franco is the resident comic relief doofus. Everyone here keeps clashing with each other vocally, resulting in a painfully distracting ride.

And that’s without bringing the animation into the equation, courtesy of AIC Studios and Assemblage Entertainment, the latter of which was also responsible for Norm Of The North and Elliott The Littlest Reindeer. It is also rife with inconsistencies, from the character designs (which vary from cartoonish proportions to full-on bobbleheads) to the texture quality (when your film mainly consists of snow, being able to render it properly should’ve been a priority but apparently not) to the lame attempts at ‘action’, which mostly consist of literal snowball fights and sleeping gas. There’s an opening gag with Swifty blending into the snowy background, and the animation quality isn’t nearly good enough to make that work as it likely did on paper. Hell, literally animating on paper would’ve been a better look than what we get here. There’s only so many tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy otters you can push on-screen to distract from the blindingly obvious problems here.

On that same note of conspiracy caricatures, this might be one of the worst attempts at environmentalism I’ve seen in a film yet. The main plot involves Cleese’s Otto Van Walrus and his plans to frack on the land that Swifty calls home. Climate change and increased temperatures are part of the narrative momentum, and it’s remarkably not-subtle about the whole thing. Except, in its attempts to try and highlight it as a serious issue, it just can’t help but undermine its own intentions by depicting anyone who sees what’s really going on as crazy people.

From the aforementioned otters, to Swifty’s perpetually-changing priorities from himself to everyone else at the drop of a hat, to the fact that it keeps trying to mine comedy out of something very real and actually happening in the world, I wouldn’t be surprised if certain families walked away from this with their pre-conceived notions of how ‘loony’ environmentalists are being confirmed for them. Even Norm Of The North didn’t fail this badly at similar messaging; at least that film had a somewhat interesting bent from including arctic tourism in its narrative.

Then again, I doubt that that many families, or even singular people, will end up seeing this. Not only has it been marketed poorly, it has also broken records for worst opening weekend of a film released in over 2800 theatres; there is little to no chance of this making back its $50 million budget. And at the risk of sounding callous, that’s probably a good thing. Something this slapdash, this lazy, this infinitely dull (yeah, on top of everything else, it is criminally unengaging), should rationally be a turning point, a chance for animation studios to consider maybe not aiming for the lowest common denominator and start putting out family films with a touch more effort to them. But that’s if the world made sense, and this film’s mere existence would suggest otherwise.