Come for Chip 'n Dale, shrug off 'Rescue Rangers'
Disney+
I wonder if anyone would care if a comedy didn’t really have a third act and just tried to be hilarious the whole time. Unsatisfying narrative, hugely satisfying funny experience. Because otherwise there’s always the matter of moving things along, and many very funny movies dip hard (“Anchorman,” to name just one) when it comes time to turn the gears and do more than soar on banter.
“Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers,” the long-awaited—in the sense that it’s been a long time since the original series, not in the sense that anyone necessarily expected a movie right now—feature-length revival of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s Disney series, is a great example of a comedy that has a lot of laughs and that I also really didn’t care about at all. I will recommend it to many and include an asterisk every time.
If you kind of but don’t really remember the original series, that’s probably for the best; the target audience here seems more like those with vague nostalgia but stronger connections to “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and John Mulaney comedy specials and “The Lego Movie” and “Big Mouth.” Mulaney and Samberg have such recognizable voices that their casting as the titular chipmunks is both an invitation for a certain demographic and a giveaway about the characters’ personalities. So it’s a credit to writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, and director Akiva Schaffer (of The Lonely Island and “Hot Rod” and “Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping”), that “C’nD: RR” moves best when it’s just Chip ‘n Dale bouncing off each other, clashing and collaborating for the first time in years when an old colleague (voiced by Eric Bana) is kidnapped by a criminal known as Sweet Pete (Will Arnett, overused in the voiceover world). There’s a real sense of comedic unpredictability here, unless you expect a great joke about “Law and Order” and commentary on the hideous animation of movies like “The Polar Express.”
In fact, the mix of live-action and animation (in the style of the of course superior “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”) works far better as a spot-the-reference wink at the history of animation than it does as a caper, no matter how much self-referential effort is put into out-thinking the movie’s and the narrative’s built-in disposability. Just because you call out a cliche doesn’t mean you can just shrug and do it anyway, and for a movie as funny as “C’nD: RR,“ the 87-minute runtime feels longer than you’d think.
Still, though: The biggest laughs are really big, and when talking about a comedy, “highly quotable and rather forgettable” is better than most.
B-
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