Posted By Iain McNally on July 15, 2013

Turbo is an odd animated movie. This isn’t a bad thing, as there are plenty of good ones out there that are even odder. The problem is that the world created in those other movies, while weird, manage to maintain a consistent tone. Something that I feel Turbo, to its detriment, doesn’t.

Average snails Theo (Ryan Reynolds) and his brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) work in a garden’s tomato patch, avoiding the “Shellcrusher” kid on his Big Wheel and farming tomatoes for food, with Theo stuck disposing of the overripe tomatoes thanks to his propensity for daydreaming about racing and regularly suffering the derision of his co-workers.

How he came to this obsession is never really clear. He just dreams of being a racer and as the film tells us at many points throughout: “no dream is too big, no dreamer too small”.

Theo’s dreaming stands out from the rest of the snails. They, including his brother, are a risk averse lot, with their “tuck ‘n roll” strategy for dealing with almost any threat. They’re not totally wrong about this with their delicate shells and the frequent, sudden disappearances of background snails to flyby crow attack (RIP Phil, Jerry), but this does lead to a fairly conformist world view. One that barely tolerates Theo’s outlandish imaginings.

A snail can dream can’t he?

After a workplace accident leaves Theo disheartened, he has a run in with some muscle cars and takes a bath in some Nitrous Oxide. This is where things really start to get weird.

Instead of merely imbuing Theo with super speed, which would stretch reality if remaining acceptable to advance the plot, he actually takes on the attributes of a car. His eye stalks acting like headlights, warning beeps and white lights accompanying him as he backs up, and at times his mouth becomes an uncontrollable car speaker, spewing numerous well known hits. Also, thanks to another crow attack, Chet and Theo find themselves far away from their garden set up and at the run down Starlight Plaza mall, whose underemployed inhabitants spend their off time racing their own snails and tricking out the shells of their racers with parts from model cars, kit bashing style.

Turbo might have been more successful (as a story) if the plot had then just continued through the standard racing movie tropes, but Turbo’s speed relative to the other snails is so incredible, the film jumps straight off the deep end with Theo, now renamed Turbo, and his new human “manager” Tito (Michael Peña) deciding that the best thing for Turbo and his new super speed is to enter the Indy 500!

The crew “s-nail” the group shot

While the world of the film reacts to this with some of the expected incredulousness, the journey doesn’t really seem worth it. Turbo is never really in any doubt of fulfilling his dream, even when the odds are initially impossibly stacked against him. The obstacles he faces along the way are mostly other people/snails and relatively minor until the final act. The world changes in reaction to Turbo’s existence. He doesn’t really change, even if he really should (his hubris in particular needs some reigning in).

Another strange thing is the interaction with the humans. In animated movies starring humans and non-humans, there are a number of ways to go with their interactions, ranging from both parties understanding each other in some way to avoiding each other altogether. In Turbo, it’s a weird mix of the two, with Turbo demonstrably understanding Tito completely at times and communicating back to him and yet snails are still generally viewed as they would be in reality. Clearly, first contact and continued communication with a sentient species here on Earth is a story worth exploring beyond the “whoa, that snail is fast” story that the film pursues, but you won’t find it here. I’m only being partly facetious because the movie lost me early with its lack of both focus and good laughs.

As another, much better critic (whose name I can’t recall) once put it, there’s a difference between children’s movies, which can appeal to everyone young and old, and movies for children which tend to only entertain the kids. The most popular animated movies tend to be the former rather than the latter, with Pixar’s efforts and Gore Verbinski’s Rango deftly weaving plot points and jokes for audiences both young and old within the same narrative, without alienating either audience along the way. Turbo mostly doesn’t follow this successful template apart from choice of the the voice talent on hand, but even that is wasted. Samuel L Jackson gets to do a variation of his “Say what again” speech from Pulp Fiction in a snail-to-snail pep talk with Turbo, There’s one piece of nice commentary on phone videos going viral and meme remix culture, but not much else.The previously mentioned sudden snatches of snails by passing crows also confuses the tone.

Turbo sports some cool concept art

Apart from Jackson the rest of the snail racer crew (Maya Rudolph, Ben Schwartz, Snoop Dogg, Mike Bell) and shop owners of Starlight Plaza (Luis Guzmán, Richard Jenkins, Ken Jeong, Michelle Rodriguez) get little to do. Jeong is at least recognizable, as he’s doing his usual screaming schtick, but Rodriguez is unrecognizable through her brief smattering of lines. Giamatti is solid, but in the lead role, Ryan Reynolds is a little bland. I completely forgot he was the lead until after the movie.

The plot also has some problems in the originality stakes, with the Starlight Plaza storyline echoing that of the Radiator Springs in Pixar’s Cars, the kid on the trike being very reminiscent of Sid from Toy Story and the ending veers way too close for comfort to parts of 2006’s Talladega Nights:The Ballad of Ricky Bobby staring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.

The addition of a few catchphrases such as “Snailed it” and “Snail up” can’t really save this animated adventure from being one for the kids only.

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Categories: Movies, Reviews
Tags: Ben Schwartz, cars, Indy 500, Ken Jeong, Luis Guzman, Maya Rudolph, Michael Pena, Michelle Rodriguez, Mike Bell, Paul Giamatti, Pixar, Richard Jenkins, Ryan Reynolds, samuel l jackson, Snail, Snoop Dogg, Talladega Nights:The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Toy Story