An average movie

A movie made by Pixar is always a big event and, even though this movie was rather poorly received, since it was available on Disney+, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, I’m afraid, I would have to agree with the critics here. Indeed, it has been years since Pixar had released such a weak movie, in fact, it might even be their weakest movie so far. It’s also a shame and incredibly frustrating that the vastly superior ‘Soul’, ‘Turning Red’ or even ‘Luca’ didn’t get a theatrical release while this movie did. Of course, you might wonder if a spin-off around the ‘Toy Story’ franchise was not misguided but I don’t think it was such a bad idea. For starters, after ‘Wall-E’, it was Pixar’s second SF feature only and, therefore, there were tons of creative potential. Even the fact that the main character was voiced by Chris Evans and not by Tim Allen was a strange choice but it did work out fine after all. Eventually, the biggest issue was that the story turned out to be rather weird and so convoluted for no good reasons. To make things worse, the damned thing was just way too long. I mean, the first 30 mins were not bad, it was still nothing great though, but the tone seemed to be right. However, from the moment Buzz came back from his first mission 4 years later, they tried to mix some dark and gritty SF elements into a classic Disney family feature and this mix didn’t work at all. At least, SOX and DERIC were fun but all the other characters were completely forgettable and underwhelming. They also added another twist regarding Zurg’s origins which was something fun in ‘Toy Story 2’ but, here, it felt, like the rest of this movie, rather convoluted but above all, hardly entertaining. Anyway, to conclude, I think my rating was actually rather generous here but I guess it might still be be worth a look, at least, if you are a big fan of Pixar’s work. 

6/10