Are video games art? The debate wages on, but not in Wreck-It Ralph, where characters
frequently mix up of the phrase “hero’s duty” with “hero’s doodie.”
The movie hangs a lot of weight on these doodie jokes. They had
me confused: so the movie’s for children who laugh at poop jokes, but then
what’s up with all these old video game references? Is there a person in the
world who both a.) finds great wonder and amusement in adolescent fecal-humor
and b.) is old enough to remember Q*bert? I think I want to meet this person,
as long as he’s not Adam Sandler.
Wreck-It Ralph has an
identity crisis. It simply does not know who its audience is, and doesn’t much
care to find out. In some scenes it’s nostalgic and sentimental about an era
long passed, when video games were 8-bit pixels and sprites and they cost a
single quarter at the arcade. These scenes play to the parents (or just the
dads perhaps), who will fondly recall Pong,
Pac-Man and putting quarters on the
edge of arcade cabinets to indicate your intention of “next game.”
But then the movie switches characters, becoming a hyperactive
tween warping through candy cane forests on a sugar rush of bad jokes about halitosis,
flatulence, pooping, something called “pixlexia” and several gags about a large
Russian street
fighter in a loincloth. These jokes play well to children, but the adults will
be cringing as they slowly feel their brain matter growing denser. Never before
has the gulf between adult and child been so wide in a Disney movie.
Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly) is a bad guy of sorts. He’s a ham-handed
8-bit character inside the Fix-It Felix
cabinet at the arcade. (In a strange plot hole, Ralph is a retro game graphic
during the game, but a CGI 3D model within his world.) Ralph plays an anti-social
hillbilly who breaks all the windows on a high-rise, and then along comes Felix
who can fix things by smashing them with a golden hammer. Ralph and Felix
aren’t really heroes or villains; they’re just playing these roles for the
benefit of the arcade customers. The games are like their day jobs. Once the
children leave, the video game characters can break from their performances to
live their lives.
But even after the game ends, Ralph is still treated like the bad
guy, which provokes an appearance at Bad-Anon, where Bowser, the Pac-Man ghosts
and zombies gather to share their experiences of being video game villains. The
zombie’s share-speech is interrupted by one of those Mortal Kombat fighters who tears a still-beating heart from the
zombie’s chest — to quote the original
game: “Fatality!” (A perfect example of an adult joke that will fly over a
child’s head.)
To prove to the Weeble-like people in the Fix-It Felix cabinet that he’s not just a villain, Ralph takes a
tram through the electrical cord to the surge suppressor on the arcade floor,
which serves as a travel hub to all the video game characters. Eventually Ralph
boots into a shooting game called Hero’s
Duty — it looks like Halo, Gears of War or any other “space marine”
game — so he can win a medal that will prove to his own game population that
he’s a hero. Ralph is eventually forced out of that game and into a nearby
racing game set within a candy-themed fantasy. There he meets Vanellope (sounds
like Vanilla-Pee and voiced by Sarah Silverman), a racer who has been forced
into retirement because she glitches, like the coding in her digital DNA is a
little wonky. Her glitch reminded me of the apocalyptic Donkey Kong “killscreen” from the documentary The King of Kong.
As you can imagine, with competing game storylines and various
characters from each game, Wreck-It Ralph
becomes quite congested. Each of the three games — the retro fix-it game, the
first-person sci-fi shooter and the candy-land racer — has its own conflicts
and plots, and they are all intertwined with one another. One plotline I
enjoyed immensely was the cute Ralph-Vanellope friendship that involved
racecar-building mini-games, Diet
Cola Mountain
The animation was suitable, though nothing fancy worth bragging
about; all these CGI movies are starting to look alike. I did like Ralph’s
hands — perfect for wrecking things with — that must equal half his bodyweight.
I also liked how the Weebles from the game had these herky-jerky movements, as
if being powered by a computer with a slow graphics card.
Though the movie may kindle your nostalgia for your youth playing
after-school video games until your eyes were crossed or until a wise parent
turned the TV off and told you to play outside, Wreck-It Ralph does not know who it’s intended for or what it’s
about. All of the pandering to the past will please the adults, but will
confuse the core younger audience. Just as the little ones are losing interest,
the movie will visit its sugar kingdom and alienate the adults with potty humor
and candy-headed characters. Toy Story,
another movie that name-dropped your youth, had a better grasp on the middle
road between the two age groups. Here, though, no middle road can be found.
It’s as if Ralph wrecked it all away.
