One star. Rated PG, despite quite scary sequences
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.15.19
This animation misfire is a total disaster.
Actually, it’s worse than that. I’ve been bored, nauseated, disgusted and repulsed by bad films over time, but only rarely do stinkers prompt the degree of hostility that swelled exponentially, as Wonder Park slogged to its conclusion.
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| June is delighted to discover that one of her favorite stuffed toys is a living, talking blue bear in the parallel realm where her fantasy theme park also is real. Too bad her joy is about to be shattered by a relentless hoard of chattering zombie monkeys... |
To paraphrase the title from one of Roger Ebert’s books, I hated, hated, hated this film.
The premise is hopelessly weird, the execution deeply flawed. Mind you, we’re talking about a medium that has successfully made heroes of gourmet rats, frost-generating princesses, and dogs struggling to survive on an island of trash.
I’m surprised Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Robert Gordon are willing to acknowledge having written this clumsy, incoherent, ill-conceived mess. I can’t imagine how the initial elevator pitch would have gone. What in the world could have prompted Paramount execs to believe this notion ever could have been made into a coherent film?
We’re talkin’ irredeemable stinker, folks.
The story, such as it is:
June Bailey (voiced by Brianna Denski), a precocious young genius probably destined for an engineering career, loves amusement parks. She and her mother (Jennifer Garner) have spent years sketching out the ultimate fantastical theme park, filled with delightfully crazy rides. They call it Wonder Park, and its pretend “ambassadors” — who “put the ‘wonder’ in Wonder Park” — are June’s assortment of stuffed animals.
But here’s the thing: Every outrageous new ride that June whispers into the ear of her stuffed monkey, Peanut, is heard and instantly fabricated by a living, breathing Peanut, who — in some alternate universe — is the magical architect of an actual Wonder Park. Which is stuffed with happy human patrons, who aren’t the slightest bit fazed to be hosted by a talking monkey (Norbert Leo Butz) and counterparts of June’s other stuffed critters: Greta, a wild boar (Mila Kunis); Boomer, a narcoleptic blue bear (Ken Hudson Campbell); Steve, the porcupine safety officer (John Oliver); and beaver brothers Gus and Cooper (Kenan Thompson and Ken Jeong).
Ohhhhh-kay. This is a stretch. Probably an impossible one, but we gotta roll with it.
(As the story proceeds, there’s a strong echo of the real-world/fantasy-world divide in The LEGO Movie, which feels a bit like copycatting.)
Back on our Earth, June spends one fine morning coaching all the local kids into “borrowing” private and city bric-a-brac, in order to build a working version of a chaotic roller coaster of sorts. She and best friend Banky (Oev Michael Urbas) then test-ride this dangerous contraption, during a wild sequence that very nearly gets them killed, while also destroying a good portion of the neighborhood.
This is … a problem. It’s obviously intended to be funny, but this portion of the story is somewhat real-world, so it isn’t comfortably funny. And this film’s inability to accurately anticipate audience response is about to get much, much worse.
June’s father (Matthew Broderick) apparently has a sizable inheritance, given the checks he apologetically writes to all their annoyed neighbors … and the fact that he never leaves the house, and the family has no visible means of support (sloppy scripting). June’s parents appropriately threaten to punish her quite severely, but — nope! — everything is back to normal in the very next scene, as she and her mother continue to develop their fantasy Wonder Park.
Right about this point, I began to sense the absence of necessary continuity, as if scenes and chunks of essential exposition had been left behind: a feeling enhanced by this film’s brief 85-minute running time.
Then, suddenly, whomp: June’s mom gets sick. Like, life-threateningly sick. Must leave the house for a long period of time sick. (To go where? we wonder.) The heartbroken June turns into a recluse, forsaking friends; worse yet, she abandons her fantasy Wonder Park.
She also becomes hyper-protective of her father: the story’s one running gag that is legitimately amusing.
Some unspecified period of time passes. (Days? Weeks? Months?) Dad finally persuades her to join Banky and other children for a trip to Math Camp, but she bolts from the bus en route, intending to return home. She instead wanders into a mildly eerie forest and — just like that, never mind how or why — winds up in the actual Wonder Park. Which is in a sad state of neglect.
Which makes sense, I guess, since June abandoned her fictitious version.
But the park isn’t merely forlorn and neglected; all of its colorful, marvelously imaginative wonderfulness is being systematically destroyed by billions of “zombie monkeys” — the park’s little stuffed mascots come to terrifying life — which are ripping everything to shreds, and feeding the remnants into a huge black cloud dubbed “the darkness.”
This is a degree of “tragic” that’s off the chart; it’s also scary and creepy, and not in an entertaining way. Some small children — and their parents — clearly got upset during last Saturday morning’s preview screening, and a few left. Can’t blame them.
On top of which, from this point forward, June’s behavior becomes erratic to a degree that’s both disorienting and disturbing. She laughs too much, at all the wrong moments; she behaves like somebody having a nervous breakdown, which clearly isn’t the story’s intent.
By this point, she has met Greta, Boomer and the others; the story subsequently revolves around their desperate efforts to save the park. The solution should be blindingly obvious to a girl of June’s intelligence and perception, but no; instead we waste time while hoards of zombie monkeys wreak havoc, in the process nearly killing June and her friends many times over. (Amazing how this girl defies the laws of physics, and never gets so much as a scratch.)
In the midst of all this horror, the story occasionally detours for “funny bits,” such as the acrophobic Boomer’s unwilling ride on a roller coaster that begins with a very, very, very high drop.
Zombie monkeys are annihilating everything, but we pause to “laugh” at Boomer? Not likely.
Rarely have I endured a film — let alone a family-friendly film — that’s so relentlessly tone-deaf.
Granted, a moral of sorts is buried beneath this carnage: Don’t let sorrow destroy your bliss. Except that there’s nothing wrong with short-term grief, and besides: The message is torched by the story’s happy-happy-kiss-kiss “surprise” conclusion.
Although this plot is hopeless to begin with, the parallel failures of tone, pacing, editing, structure — and everything else — are a director’s responsibility. You’ll be surprised to learn that this film has no credited director — which may be unprecedented — because the individual in question was fired by Paramount in January 2018, due to complaints of “inappropriate and unwanted conduct” by multiple women.
(This is particularly sad on a local level, because the director in question is Davis native son Dylan Brown, whose rising career as a budding and talented animator was chronicled in several Enterprise feature stories over the years.)
This explains a lot, because the ship obviously has been rudderless ever since. The film wasn’t finished; for reasons unknown, Paramount failed to assign a new director, and instead hired somebody to assemble the existing pieces — obviously an impossible task — and release the result, regardless of quality. Possibly because this film is a prelude to a Nickelodeon TV series supposedly debuting later this year. (The mind boggles.)
That’s a rather reprehensible money-grab, even by Hollywood’s frequently venal standards.
And quite dismaying, on all manner of levels.
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