Runtime: 1 hour, 31 minutes
Rating: PG
Director: Rob Minkoff
Quick Impressions:
When I was in second grade, I didn’t like school much, so I would try to wake up as early in the morning as possible. That way, I could spend a large chunk of time doing something pleasant before I had to go to class and worry that I would get “licks” for sharpening my pencil too often as “the bad boys” always did. (I didn’t know how much was too often, so I just played it safe and never sharpened my pencil. When it got really flat, I’d scrape the wood back with my fingernails.) Anyway, that’s probably the only time in my life I’ve voluntarily woken up in the dark seven days a week!
On Saturday mornings, the show that came on insanely early was Rocky and Bullwinkle. I still remember how I loved snuggling under a cozy blanket on the couch watching the show on our living room TV. Rocky and Bullwinkle took me by surprise because its humor was so different from 1980s children’s programming. I loved all the running jokes, the puns, the off-kilter humor. I still remember repeating my favorite moment to my mother in delight.
“…So Bullwinkle said, ‘Miss, please, try to keep a civil tongue in your head,’ and then that little man in the white suit came on again and interrupted, ‘That’s a War Between the States tongue!'”
That killed me! (I’m probably misquoting Bullwinkle’s line, but that’s the gist of the joke.) They didn’t write kids’ shows that way when I was a kid.
I’ve always enjoyed Rocky and Bullwinkle, and our kids love going to movies, so I was pretty sure we’d see Mr. Peabody & Sherman. (Since my husband is going to be in India for the next couple of weeks, I have a feeling my next review will be of something kid friendly, as well. I prefer not to go to the movies alone, and I don’t want to see The 300 sequel or The Grand Budapest Hotel without my husband. It just doesn’t seem fair.)
I did wonder, “Why are they making a Mr. Peabody & Sherman movie right now?” The film answered that question fast. It’s loaded with pretty pointed social commentary that’s impossible to miss. Well, anyway, I thought it was impossible to miss. But my husband thinks it will prove quite possible to miss and that I underestimate the tenacity of viewers determined to miss messages with which they don’t agree. He’s probably right. On the plus side, the fact that we had this discussion in the car on our way home prompted our eleven-year-old to remark in surprise, “So sometimes movies are telling you something?” After a few minutes of discussion, he asked, “Is it that way with everything? Do you think there’s a message we’re supposed to get out of…like…Spiderman?” (Ask Uncle Ben. He’ll be happy to tell you. More than once if necessary.)
So not only does Mr. Peabody and Sherman offer a fun romp through history, but it can be educational in other ways, as well.
The Good:
The movie quickly gets off to a very promising start (after kind of a weird little cartoon short featuring Steve Martin as an ill-fated alien space captain).
It opens with an introduction of Peabody and Sherman, and then dives right into one of their adventures through time in the notorious Wayback machine. This delightful, cake-filled whirl through the French Revolution plays a lot like one of the original Peabody and Sherman shorts from Rocky and Bullwinkle. The episode even ends with one of Mr. Peabody’s trademark morals, a clever-yet-groan-worthy pun that sails right over the top of young Sherman’s head. It’s so like the old show that for all I know, it is taken directly from an episode of the old show. The only difference is it’s now in 3D and features a lot more action.
That opening in France is pretty effective. It’s well paced, occasionally witty, silly, and the perfect showcase for introducing Mr. Peabody’s character and personality to today’s young audiences.
But it’s more than just silly good fun.
The movie doesn’t debunk the whole, “Let them eat cake,” thing, but it does show very clearly that the remark is taken out of context and woven into a well-crafted piece of propaganda used to incite revolution.
That’s a pretty sophisticated move for a silly little kids’ movie about a dog and his boy.
I mean, right from the first big sequence, the movie has the audience questioning history. You get this idea that what we are told about the past is never reliable. What many of us now consider factual history is shown to be, in fact, just a well-planned piece of propaganda, concocted by people who had an agenda, to say the least.
So Peabody manages to finish the episode with a corny little pun, and everything is going swimmingly…until Sherman has to start school.
The next forty minutes of the movie are not as effective as they could be (but I’ll talk about that more later. The pacing is off, and the stress level is pretty high.)
But then we get more episodic mayhem as Peabody, Sherman, and Sherman’s “enemy” Penny travel back in time in a machine, routinely encountering wacky mishaps like something out of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure or even Dr. Who.
Once all the Wayback excitement starts up again, the film finds its footing, and entertains its audience. (Why the movie needs such an elaborate, intense plot is something I don’t understand. I think just an episodic series of adventures might have worked better.)
Peabody, Sherman, and Penny have several captivating, amusing adventures as they travel through time. And then, at the end of the movie, everything really gets crazy, and some well written dialogue sells the ending and redeems all the time the movie wasted earlier on setting up its bogged-down, stressful unifying plot.
Ty Burrell makes a pretty good Mr. Peabody, I think. Max Charles and Ariel Winter are good as Sherman and Penny, too (although it’s certainly not as hard to play the kids as it is to play Mr. Peabody).
Best Scene:
All the scenes that take place back in time are the best. After the movie, our five-year-old volunteered that her favorite part is a Rubik’s Cube joke at the very end. (She recently learned what a Rubik’s Cube is while watching an episode of her favorite web show Nerdy Nummies, and she did laugh pretty hard at the joke.)
But she enjoyed all the scenes that took place back in time. She found an early joke about sewer water hilarious (and unfortunately remarked rather noisily on what she suspected might be in the water).
Best of all, she loved the part set in ancient Egypt. She wants to be an archeologist when she grows up and has long had an interest in Egyptian funerary customs. So she was on the edge of her seat throughout this entire sequence. She just really ate it up.
And I liked that part a lot, too. For one thing, after slowing down for a while in the second act (or whatever act you want to call it depending on how you prefer to break up the movie), Mr. Peabody & Sherman finally rediscovers its energy and picks up the pace during these scenes. The jokes are faster and funnier. The situation has greater urgency. There’s more peril, more adventure, more action, more 3D effects. (We saw the film in 2D, but it’s easy to imagine where that extra D would come into play.)
Honestly, instead of the old “Peabody and Sherman” cartoons, this Egyptian interlude reminded me more of a mash-up of kids’ entertainment in the 1980s. It’s like one part The Chipmunk Adventure, two parts Indiana Jones, and other assorted parts that look an awful lot like bits and pieces of my cinematic childhood. I guess it’s fitting that they’re stumbling around in a tomb with mummies since the whole sequence is like a Frankenstein’s monster made of movie homages.
Funniest Scene:
Much of the humor in this film is directed at adults. I’m not saying that it’s crude. (What Peabody yells to Sherman when he bursts through the elevator doors could definitely make the faint of heart among us blush, but that’s not really adult sexual humor. Almost everyone in the auditorium laughed, including our eleven-year-old. I’d guess that most kids in the upper elementary grades are going to get that joke. There’s a quick reference at the end that could be construed as a dirty joke, but the thing is, to get the joke at all, you have to know history.)
What I’m getting at is, the most humorous and rewarding aspects in the movie come from being vaguely familiar with history/literature/classic movies (there’s a fantastic surprise “cameo” that really cracked me up, but you have to know about old movies about older history to get it) /current events from before people my kids’ age were born. You also have to have a grown-up vocabulary to get all of Peabody’s word play.
So the film gives us a mix of reasonably sophisticated humor (though you don’t have to be a genius or anything; you just need to know a little about very famous historical figures/moments) and very juvenile slapstick (that usually involves butts and what can come out of them).
Personally, one of the things I found funniest is that someone dissatisfied with his own father might run away and seek the protection of Agamemnon! (I mean, can you imagine anybody yelling in adolescent frustration, “I wish Agamemnon was my dad!”? He was so nice to Iphigenia, after all, and he had such a happy family life. Who wouldn’t kill to be in that family?)
(It’s also a nice tough that Agamemnon is voiced by Patrick Warburton who for the good of mankind should appear in every animated feature. Like Dan Castellaneta, Warburton makes every line funnier just by saying it in his hilarious voice. He’s capable of elevating any material.)
Best Action Sequence:
I’m personally a fan of the flying scene. I’m sure it looks even better in 3D. It made me remember Florence and also think fondly of Hudson Hawk (if not one of the craziest movies I’ve ever seen, then certainly one of the craziest movies I’ve ever liked). (Stanley Tucci and Lake Bell are pretty great in their roles.)
Best Scene Visually:
I wish we could have seen the last big sequence in the film in 3D, the part with the massive portal. I’m sure that would have looked amazing.
The Negatives:
The movie has major pacing problems. When we’re not having adventures in the Wayback, the film really drags.
It’s also very stressful. My daughter (who loves scary movies but is horrified by the cinematic depiction of interpersonal conflict) got incredibly stressed out and anxious during the non-Wayback parts of the film. Honestly, that stuff was stressing me out, too. (I mean, she starts kindergarten this fall. I don’t want her to think that school will be like that. Also, I don’t want to think that school might be like that for her.) Honestly, some of the scenes in this felt very intense to me. Not since Rise of the Planet of the Apes have I been so close to a panic attack worrying about meddlesome outsiders ripping a loving but unconventional family apart.
But though she was stressed out, my five-year-old still kept her composure enough to continue watching the movie. She watched the whole thing most attentively and claimed to have liked it at the end, citing several favorite moments, and singling out the last Rubik’s Cube joke.
Inconsistent pacing is really what drags the film down. But I think part of the reason that the non-Wayback scenes seem so slow is that they’re not enjoyable to watch. (I like both Stephen Colbert and Leslie Mann, and they do what they can, but it’s not enough.) These scenes are highly stressful, and maybe a bit more fraught than they ought to be.
There’s also very pointed social commentary, which often gets on my nerves. I don’t like it when movies drop all subtlety to push an agenda, even when I agree with said agenda (which I usually do in the case of mainstream movies being pushed at us by “liberal Hollywood.”). (That’s what bugged me about The Lorax, though it had some rousing songs, and I certainly agree that we shouldn’t continue destroying the environment.) In this case, though, the movie is actually subtle and artful enough to escape my wrath. It doesn’t force its message across artlessly, but it doesn’t deliver it particularly well, either (in artistic terms) for most of the movie.
My husband doesn’t think that everyone will see what I’m talking about, but listen to this. A dog adopts a boy. When the boy goes to school, he’s teased because his father is a dog. The school social worker gets involved and declares that dogs shouldn’t be allowed to adopt human children because it’s against nature. A dog couldn’t possibly be a proper parent to a human child because that’s not a natural arrangement. So the dog pulls out all the stops trying to impress the social worker, but nothing he does is ever good enough because she’s already made up her mind in advance that he’s not a fit father because he’s a dog. Then she backs him into a corner.
Just writing all that out is giving me a panic attack. It’s such a stressful scenario to be the driving plot of a children’s movie. Besides that, Mr. Peabody & Sherman seems transparent in the message it’s trying to get across. I mean, the way the film ends is pretty emphatic and hard to misunderstand. Sherman’s solution to the whole mess is perfectly worded. I won’t spoil the ending by repeating what he says, but he basically sums up the whole point of the movie in a couple of well-put sentences.
The thing is, what Sherman says is so good that the ending suddenly felt really powerful to me, and so I liked it (even though much of what came before was heavy-handed, slow, stressful, and boring). Sherman is innocent and doesn’t even realize what he’s saying (making his words all the more powerful). Peabody sees a very scientific solution in Sherman’s words, one Sherman doesn’t really intend or understand. Adults in the audience should see the movie’s message in Sherman’s words (again, this is not what he intends. He’s just a child who feels he personally has made a terrible series of mistakes). But these words are well chosen by the writers, well delivered by Max Charles, and terribly effective.
What happens to Ms. Grunion, too, is pretty pointed and hard to overlook. She ends up exactly where she belongs. If you don’t get that message, then I don’t know what to tell you. (But when I figure it out, I’ll tell you directly in literal, straight-forward terms.)
(I will add that I was personally quite relieved to get that late scene that shows us how Ms. Grunion feels about her new situation because the last time you see her just before that, it’s hard not to feel a bit of uneasy horror. I mean, it’s a funny joke, and a fitting end and everything, but viewed in one way, it’s pretty harsh.)
I always like Allison Janney (who voices Ms. Grunion), but this particular character really stressed me (and my daughter) out.
In the end, I thought the movie made a nice statement and offered up plenty of humor, food for thought, and material for discussion. But I do think that the “fun” sequences set in the past are more effective, more entertaining, and more deftly executed than the heavier, clumsier, slower mechanics of the highly stressful central plot. In the end, the story is emotionally rewarding and makes a really strong (and optimistic) statement about life and society. It’s uplifting—which Mr. Peabody must love because um…I don’t want to spoil the ending, but you know, the solution to the big problem, it really is uplifting, wink, wink, if you know what I mean.
Overall:
Mr. Peabody & Sherman is a pretty respectable present day treatment of beloved (by me, at least) source material. It has some pacing problems, and its plot may be stressful for younger children, but when the characters step into the Wayback machine, the movie really fires on all cylinders. At its best, the film is funny, witty, insightful, thought-provoking, and genuinely touching. And if you go see it, chances are you’ll get to enjoy the preview for How to Train Your Dragon 2, which is finally coming out this summer.