Y’know, if you’re going to insist on having a singer be a lead character in a film, and they aren’t exactly well-known or even all that capable of acting, having them play a character who literally only sings seems like a da-doy moment for musical movies as a whole. I mean, when the alternatives are trying to get the likes of Adam Levine to be in any convincing as an actor, or saddling actual actors with painfully-obvious dubbing, it’s a wonder why more productions don’t aim for this.
Now, that’s not to say that the gimmick is done to any high degree of skill, though. Shawn Mendes as a singer isn’t someone I have any real opinion of (for every There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back, there’s an abomination like Treat You Better), but he does fine here. No, the problem comes with the songs he’s been given to sing here, which is a combination of jukebox picks and original songs from Pasek & Paul. While the former involves some painfully obvious choices, like that one Elton John song that would likely show up in a parody of this exact concept, it’s the latter that really holds this film down.
The melodies are all incredibly samey, and not all that catchy, while the lyrics are painfully generic. There’s some mentions of scales here and there, but even that feels like it could have been used in any other context and just be vague lyrical imagery. As much as Mendes, Javier Bardem, and even Constance Wu are trying their best to give these listless tunes some energy in the performance, they still don’t add a whole lot to the larger production, aside from just giving Lyle more to sing. Honestly, and I’m just spit-balling here, they probably should have leaned more into the jukebox side of things, maybe even have Lyle sing as his dialogue, use a line or two from a song when conversing with Bardem’s Valenti and the Primm family. It’d still fit the overall mood of the film, and it wouldn’t feel like Pasek & Paul’s efforts were put to waste.
Then again, the film is still kind of iffy when it comes to that mood to begin with. It basically plays out like a singing variant of Paddington, where the inclusion of a sentient animal brings joy and a new lease on life to whoever they interact with, especially the main family that takes them in. William Davies’ scripting shows real strain in trying to juggle all these different character relationships, to the point where things that feel like they should have been built up (like the relationship between Winslow Fegley’s Josh and Lyric Hurd’s Trudy as his supposed crush) are just swept through for the sake of keeping things moving. Fegley easily comes across the best in this regard, as his connection with Lyle is the one that feels the most authentic and even charming in places, aided by a solid in-universe use of Fegley not being a practised singer.
The worst,
however, is also easy enough to pick out: Valenti, the showman who discovered
the singing crocodile in a pet shop and who… abandoned him. More than once. And
who gets off suspiciously easy for that, I might add. Bardem tries to give the
character an oddball charisma to weigh out how flighty he can get, but the
story is really uncomfortable in dealing with his position as a toxic
element in Lyle’s life. Where this gets even worse is in how the film at large also
ends up taking that similar position, initially saying that Lyle doesn’t need
to prove anything to anyone in regards to his singing ability, and showing
Valenti as being in the wrong for putting him in that position… only to have
the entire finale involve putting him back into it, and it suddenly
being framed as a good thing. Making animals perform for the amusement of an
audience has always been part of the subtext when it comes to talking animal
movies, but they aren’t usually this direct or accepting of it as a
reasonable expectation.
Okay, as much as I’m bitching about this thing, I will admit that this probably isn’t as vile as I might be making it sound. It’s not all that great, and I still maintain that its approach to being a musical was mishandled, but for a film about a singing crocodile, it’s not that bad. The animation work on Lyle, while a bit wonky when it comes to textures, allow him enough facial expression to get plenty of emotion across even without having to talk prose, so if nothing else, the want to see him do good might be strong enough for kids to get into. I might have reservations about how his character is treated… okay, scratch that, I definitely have reservations about that, but it’s still fairly harmless as a story. I just wish it was stronger in the areas it chooses to focus on, the music in particular.
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