There was nothing quite as effective in shattering my resolve to wind down my movie-watching for the next couple of months as the entreaties of my ultra-cute three-year-old daughter that she wanted to watch "snail" which was what she believed to be the title of Dreamworks' Animation's new movie Turbo, starring the voices of Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Samuel L. Jackson and a whole slew of other Hollywood stars. This movie actually piqued my curiosity with its distinctly ironic premise of a snail becoming fast enough to race in the Indianapolis 500, but after sitting through a glut of action movies and two consecutive animated films in the last three months or so I didn't really know if I had it in me to sit through yet another cartoon.
As it turns out, pardon the pun, I had just enough in the tank to appreciate this one, which was pretty good, all things considered.
Theo, or as he likes to call himself, Turbo (Reynolds) is a garden snail living somewhere in California with his brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) and several other garden snails, but who has a very peculiar personality quirk; he is a speed fanatic. He spends his days in a greenhouse with several other snails, knocking rotten tomatoes off their vines, and his nights watching the Indy Racing League on an old television in the garage, at least until the T.V. gets broken. He wanders around town and, amidst the speeding cars, he falls from a bridge right onto a car about to start a drag race. He is sucked into the hot rod's blower, and, when the driver of the car turns on the nitrous oxide feed that is supposed to give his car a boost in speed, Turbo is flooded with it, and when he is spit out of the car's exhaust, he is a changed snail. He has been endowed with super speed.
After a disastrous incident in the garden involving his new-found speed and a sadistic little boy with a tricycle, Turbo and Chet leave the garden and end up being captured by Tito (Michael Pena), the truck driver and co-owner of a taco restaurant in a strip malls somewhere in Van Nuys. Tito enters Turbo in a snail race he regularly has with the other business operators of the strip mall, not quite realizing what he has on his hands, and when Turbo demonstrates his incredible speed, Tito realizes he has a chance to promote not only the taco stand he runs with his brother Angelo (Luis Guzman) but the whole strip mall as well. Meanwhile, Turbo befriends the "crew" of snails headed by Whiplash (Samuel L. Jackson) who admire his speed but show him that they still have a thing or two to teach him.
With his blazing speed and the encouragement of his new friends, Turbo decides to pursue his greatest dream: to win the legendary Indianapolis 500. It won't be easy, even after he convinces Tito, through a series of overt gestures, to enter him in the contest, he still has to face five-time Indy 500 winner Guy Gagne (Bill Hader), who also happens to be Turbo's idol.
The premise of this film, by itself, is a lot of fun, but not exactly the kind of conceit that, by itself, can sustain a feature-length film. To address this, the filmmakers threw in a few other plot devices, like Turbo's own feelings of inadequacy, as exemplified by a scene involving a perfect tomato, as well as parallel "brothers" stories between the two snails on one hand, and Tito and Angelo on the other, with Chet's support and approval being the one thing that Turbo apparently needs to succeed. The paper thin villain of the film is the kind who will easily be forgotten, and Turbo's "crew" of snails look designed to sell toys and to give him characters to interact with in the reported spin-off series. In short, for all of the padding the writers have thrown in to extend a half-hour cartoon into a ninety-minute film, and despite some earnest performances by the voice actors, I really felt the thinness and familiarity of the well-worn plot of pursuing one's dreams. Henry Jackman's endlessly derivative score, which seemed to have been yanked right out of Cars in a few scenes, did not help things either.
What really carried the film, however, were some stunning visuals, especially of the magnificent racing sequences. Until I see Ron Howard's Rush, due out later this year, I will have to content myself with the depiction of open-wheel racing in this film, and it was genuinely interesting to see the racing from a snail's point of view, with the "marbles" or bits of rubber flaking off the tires looking absolutely enormous. The marbles would play an important role in the race later on, as well. I was also amused by the sequence in which the racing cars metamorphosed into giant rolling tomatoes in Turbo's mind's eye as he remembered his big moment of failure from earlier in the film; to my mind it was pretty imaginative.
I am officially all cartooned-out; I have seen five animated feature films this year and I am pretty sure that, no matter how sweetly my three-year-old asks me, I do not want to see another for quite some time.
Still, if nothing else,, this film was at least more lively than the somewhat tepid, presumptuously-named Epic, and is reasonable fun for grown-ups who have an hour and a half to spare, especially the ones with kids who know how to ask very nicely if they can watch a movie.
3.5/5
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