Spies in Disguise

RATING: C+

Before Illumination and their Despicable Me/Minions series showed up, Blue Sky Studios was pretty much the "other animation studio" not named Disney/Pixar or DreamWorks, responsible for the Ice Age and Rio series. While most of their material has generally been targeted towards a somewhat lower age demographic than the other animation studios, their latest (and maybe last? I have no idea how they're going to co-exist with Disney Animation now that Disney owns them and Fox) movie branches out a little, into a spy adventure comedy. 

This one centers around a secret agent named Lance Sterling (Will Smith), who ends up crossing paths with an ambitious late-teens inventor named Walter (Tom Holland), who--unlike the rest of the people at the fictional agency--is more interested in creating less destructive and deadly gadgets to vanquish bad guys. When Sterling is on the run after being framed, he ends up getting accidentally transformed into a pigeon by Walter. Now they have to stop a cybernetic terrorist with... drones? We really like using drone armies in our action/adventure movies now, don't we?

There actually are some interesting concepts in this movie; they do some interesting things with the idea of "secret agent pigeon." And the film's more pacifistic angle is treated mostly well, with both sides of the argument getting a fair day, and it not feeling overly preachy (even though some of Walter's "gadgets" in that pursuit do feel rather silly--like kitty glitter bombs). 

I also like how most of the main characters in this movie are animated to be vague-but-somewhat-similar representations of their voice actors--and their most popular types of roles. Will Smith voices a cocky, swaggering agent. Tom Holland voices an awkward genius. Ben Mendelsohn voices a very-not-nice guy.

Where a lot of the problems come in here is in some of the choices at humor. There are some actually funny moments in this movie. But there's also some more juvenile and bizarre moments that are supposed to be funny, as well as some moments that just leave one going "What were they thinking?!" Case in point: when we learn way more about a pigeon's anatomy than necessary. Not to mention a couple cheap shout-outs to not-cool pop culture gimmicks, like Will Smith's character saying "now *that's* hot!" as if we needed a YouTube Rewind reference. 

There's a couple of other annoyances along the way--some of Walter's ideas are genuinely clever, but others are a bit over-the-top (as mentioned earlier). There's also an action scene or two that is rather difficult to follow, due to it being hard to tell who's firing what and what rays of something are actually dangerous. 

This is not a bad movie by any means, but it does hold itself back a bit much with some of its ill-advised humor and thus wastes some of its more interesting ideas. While Blue Sky's made a couple of hits, they've never been top-tier quality-wise in the animation department, and despite some of its better efforts, this one doesn't really change that status either.