The Day the Earth Blew Up: Overly chaotic

The Day the Earth Blew Up (2024) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for mild rude humor and relentless cartoon violence

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Although it’s wonderful to see a full-length Looney Tunes adventure done in the retro, hand-drawn style of its ancestor shorts, the story needed to be fine-tuned a lot more.

 

It's an average morning for Porky Pig and Daffy Duck ... but events already are underway
that soon will plunge them into a nightmare zombie apocalypse.

Eleven (!) scripters are credited, along with another four “story consultants” ... and I’m afraid that shows. Far too many things are thrown against the wall, many of which don’t stick, and the entire third act isn’t supported by what precedes it.

When initially made under the Warner Bros. banner, this film was cheekily conceived as a “post-apocalyptic science-fiction zombie buddy comedy.” That’s certainly accurate, for better or worse.

 

(Incoming Warners Bros. Discovery David Zaslav damn near shelved this finished film, until relenting in the face of fan outcry, after which he shopped it to replacement distributor Ketchup Entertainment, whom we can thank for being able to see it at all.)

 

Director Peter Browngardt has modeled his approach after the style of Bob Clampett and Tex Avery, the most manic of the classic Looney Tunes directors. The humor here therefore is hyper and frenzied, every scene a five-alarm fire, rather than — by way of contrast — the quieter, precisely timed, slow-burn humor of Chuck Jones’ Road Runner cartoons.

 

(Browngardt also developed and helmed the new six-season Looney Tunes Cartoons series, maintaining the spirit of the classic shorts, which debuted on MAX from 2020-23.)

 

This film also serves as an origin story for Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, adopted as orphan infants by kindly Farmer Jim (voiced by Fred Tatasciore). This imposing sodbuster is weirdly “animated” as a series of still images, their sole movement being his lips when speaking (sorta-kinda hearkening back to the 1959-60 cartoon series Clutch Cargo ... and if you understand that reference, you’re as old as I am).

 

Porky and Daffy come of age under this benevolent man’s guidance, somehow surviving school among human students, and eventually reaching adulthood (each now voiced by Eric Bauza, doing spot-on imitations of Mel Blanc’s classic handling of both characters, including Porky’s signature stutter).

 

At this point, Farmer Jim strides off into the sunset — literally — and bequeaths his house to the unlikely duo, promising that they’ll always survive whatever life throws at them, as long as they stick together.

12 Mighty Orphans: Touchdown!

12 Mighty Orphans (2021) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated PG-13, for violence, profanity and suggestive references

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.18.21

This seems to be the season for inspirational, fact-based underdog stories, and we’ve got another good one.

 

Indeed, I’m surprised it took so long for this astonishing saga to hit the big screen.

 

As a meager few spectators watch, coach Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson, left),
Doc Hall (Martin Sheen, right) and a dispirited Snoggs (Jacob Lofland) contemplate
the disaster unfolding on the football field.

Director Ty Roberts’ heartfelt adaptation of author/sportswriter Jim Dent’s mesmerizing 2008 nonfiction book may be the ultimate underdog saga, given its Depression-era setting.

Events begin when Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson), his wife Juanita (Vinessa Shaw) and their little daughter Betty (Josie Fink) drive onto the grounds of the Fort Worth Masonic Widows and Orphans Home. Rusty has just become the institution’s head football coach: a significant step down from his previous successful position at Temple High School, and a decision made even stranger by the fact that Fort Worth Masonic doesn’t have a football team.

 

Heck, it doesn’t even have a football field: merely an open stretch of gravel, rocks and grass occupied by scrawny goats.

 

(The actual Russell had a good reason for this apparently rash and impulsive decision: a crucial detail poorly hinted at, in the otherwise solid script by Roberts, Lane Garrison and Kevin Meyer. Brief and vague flashbacks to Russell’s WWI trench experience aren’t sufficient.)

 

The challenge seems insurmountable, given that most of the older boys — the few with any potential, only 12 of whom qualify — are as scrawny as the aforementioned goats. They’re also an unkempt, ill-mannered and under-education bunch, with a tendency to quarrel and fight each other. That’s particularly true of the newest arrival, Hardy Brown (Jake Austin Walker), delivered — his clothes ominously covered in fresh blood — by the local sheriff.

 

Most of the other boys go by nicknames: Snoggs (Jacob Lofland), Wheatie (Slade Monroe), Fairbanks (Levi Dylan) and so forth.

 

Their belligerence and uncooperative natures aside, the enormity of Rusty’s endeavor becomes clear when the field is cleared for the first practice. He expected the absence of anything resembling uniforms, but the boys don’t even have shoes. Nor is there a football, so Juanita and Betty improvise a substitute.

 

Despite all this, Rusty remains hopeful; he senses an inner spirit, a yearning for pride, waiting to be nurtured. He understands that those who have nothing, and are given an opportunity to amount to something, will fight like hell to embrace and retain it.