Movie Reviews

Review in a Hurry:  Can a cheaply animated cult cartoon featuring a superpowered talking Happy Meal—that's occasionally watchable for eleven minutes—sustain as a full-length feature? Uh, no.

The Bigger Picture:  For those of you unfamiliar with Cartoon Network's surreal franchise, here's some background about the main characters: The milkshake has a flamethrower and is dumb; the ball of raw meat can change shape and is also dumb but also kinda sweet; the floating carton of french fries shoots laser beams from its eyes and is the smart one. Together, they bicker and occasionally fight not so supervillains, mostly by accident, across garishly colored backdrops.

Frequently things blow up.

It's the sort of thing that occasionally happens upon inspired lunacy, but more often comes across as a sadly demented Beavis and Butthead. The Aqua Teen MO is to build a plot out of seeming non sequiturs, take a few iffy jokes and repeat them until they stop being funny, then beat those dead horses mercilessly with the hope they'll come back to life. Some of them, miraculously, do just that—the malevolent exercise machine that drives the plot is a single, simple bit that keeps coming back for more, and the pixelated Mooninite characters (of the infamous Boston Lite-Brite bomb scare incident) are always worth at least a chuckle.

But the low-rent, patchwork animation (some cheap-looking CGI, some cel-shaded Flash-quality stuff) wears on the eyes really fast, and most of the comedic dead horses (awkward kisses between a Plutonic sludgepile and a birdlike robot from the future, for example) do exactly what dead horses usually do: lie there and rot. On television, they don't have that long to get ripe, but on the big screen, Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters does nothing but ruin your appetite.

The 180—a Second Opinion:  If half of the foregoing review made any sense to you whatsoever, you're probably going to end up seeing this sooner or later. We won't hold it against you.