Turbo (2013)
THE SCOOP
Director: David Soren
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Pena, Richard Jenkins
Plot: A freak accident might just help an everyday garden snail achieve his biggest dream: winning the Indy 500.
Genre: Animation / Adventure / Comedy
Awards: -
Runtime: 96min
Rating: G for some mild action and thematic elements.
IN RETROSPECT (Guest Review by Amit Agarwal)
This film was reviewed in the 3D format.
Turbo, the latest family film from Dreamworks Animation is colourful, snappy and intermittently funny. Ok, quite funny considering how much my daughter and the rest of the kids in the theatre enjoyed it. What more can one ask of a 90 minute animated film?
At the centre of the film is a snail (Ryan Reynolds) who
happens to be a die-hard NASCAR fan. He
falls onto a busy motorway and gets sucked into a tank of nitrous in the
engine. This transforms him into a super
snail capable of zipping at over 200mph.
Roughly the same kind of stuff happens to his insides, as does to say
Spiderman when funny chemicals enter his bloodstream and transform him. Of course “with great powers come great
responsibility”. You know the drill.
The newborn super-snail names himself Turbo and is soon
alienated from his brethren who are just moving through life at, well, snail’s
pace. He along with his still-slow
brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) are expelled from the herd and are captured by
Tito, a genial starry-eyed snail racer (Michael Peña). The snail racer runs a Mexican restaurant with
his bro (Luis Guzmán), so there’s a parallel track of brotherly strife here.
Turbo and Tito have big dreams, no absurd dreams, like a
snail in an actual car race and both their brothers just don’t get it. So will Turbo race in the Indianapolis 500? Will he win? To the credit of the director knowing the
answers to these questions does not come in the way of the fun.
There’s plenty of cute business thrown in involving the
good old slow poke snails Tito and his friends race after pimping them up. They are a diverse collection of jazzy primary
colours with the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Maya Rudolph, and Ben
Schwartz. Jackson’s rendering of
Whiplash and Giamatti’s as Chet stand out and their chemistry is quite
enjoyable. Lines like “What if you wake
up tomorrow and your powers are gone?” may give grown-ups deja-vu but will
continue to work with younger audiences.
Director David Soren, along with co-writers Darren Lemke
and Robert D. Siegel assemble stock animated characters, thumping pop songs,
and some smart slapstick together in a workable package that has moments of
genuine creativity. The level of detail
in the animation is quite impressive and worth noticing.
Turbo’s racing
sequences which use 3-D to its advantage without being intrusive, drive home
the thrill of racing as something bigger than, as Chet makes it out to be,
“Left turn… left turn… ooh, another left turn!”
Nahh bro, racing is much more than that!
Overall the film seems conspicuously
merchandising-friendly and kids should be royally pestering their parents to
buy them the entire snail collection comprising Turbo and gang. Although there is nothing revolutionary about
Turbo’s underdog narrative it works because of its emotional beats derived from
a healthy human-snail relationship.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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