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I wanted to review a different movie this week, but since I've been clearing out my room, I've packed it away for the time being. So I decided to look at one of the movies I randomly found in a Walmart bargain bin to see if it was worth the eight dollars it was priced at.
The cover may say that the title is The Wild Life, and that is correct, but only in North America, in other regions it was released as Robinson Crusoe. It is a Belgian-French production released in 2016, and is, as the title would suggest, based on the Robinson Crusoe story by Daniel Defoe, though I'm gonna have to assume loosely. I've never read the original text, or seen any of the other adaptations. I went into the movie completely blind and what I got was a boring wreck that would have left me stranded.
When Robinson Crusoe gets shipwrecked on the shores of a mysterious island, he comes across many animals that are, at first, afraid of him, but as time goes on Crusoe and the animals end up becoming good friends and build a tree house and a watchtower. All the while a group of evil cats are plotting to remove Crusoe from the island and kill the other animals. Did that plot sound exciting? No? Well now you know problem number one with the movie.
The plot is bare bones. They try to flesh it out by having another character be apprehensive and skeptical towards Crusoe, but all this amounts to having her fly off and be chased by the cats. There is a scene where she sabotages the watchtower by blowing out the candles, but it leads to nothing, there is no great character turn around, no moment of realization that she was in the wrong, nothing. What we get instead, is plenty of scenes that contain nothing but movement, I believe internet critics have dubbed this kind of scene "Movement porn".
As for the characters, there really isn't any. Crusoe is just kind of the likable doofus, Tuesday the parrot is optimistic and get this, wants more than his boring life, where have I heard that before? The cats are just your generic evil villains, they start off being manipulative and cunning, but they end up being bloody-thirsty savages by the end of the movie. The rest of the cast is kind of one-note, the goat's entire character is that he's old, the tapir's entire character is that she's fat, the pangolin and echidna characters have none. The only other character to be slightly more fleshed out would the female bird Kiki, as she is the one who is skeptical of Crusoe for most of the movie. Again though, she has no real arc, no turn around, it goes from one minute she can't trust Crusoe or the ground he walks on, and then the next minute she's concerned for his well being. The characters leave a lot to be desired in this movie and offer nothing.
Humour wise, this movie fails. Most of the humour is slapstick and it doesn't stick. Characters don't really react to their hits and falls. In one moment, Crusoe could get hit by a board, and his only reaction would be an "Oof" or an "Ah", and not even the animals get any really funny reactions out of being hit or falling down, and the characters get beaten around a lot in this movie. As for other types of humour, there really isn't any. There is no clever wordplay or wisecracks made, characters don't really comment on anything really absurd and the only other joke we really get is the Tapir waving it's butt at the camera.
The only saving grace this movie has is the animation, but even then not by much. The movie looks bright and colourful, and kind of ugly as well. Well nothing is technically wrong with the animation, I found it to be unpleasant to look at for very long. The cat's looked ugly, ragged and scrawny, they looked worse than the early Computer Animated cat from the 1960s. The settings looked okay, but for 2016, it could have been better. While nothing is technically wrong with the animation, it left a lot to be desired.
Really though, that is the best way to summarize this movie, it left a lot to be desired. It's hard to get mad at the movie for the crime of being boring, but even then in the case of "It could've been better", movies like The Stolen Princess are worse in that regard. There are movies that are really bad and movies that are really insulting, The Wild Life is just boring and unfunny. It's hard to be angry at this movie as it doesn't do anything offensive or exceedingly bad, but at the same time it's hard to really care for this movie. It offers nothing outside of being background noise for parents who want to let the TV babysit their kids, in that respect I do kinda hate this movie, but unlike trash like Duck Duck Goose or any Video Brinquedo or Wow Now Entertainment knock-offs, it's mostly harmless. If you see it in a bargain bin for cheap, and I mean very cheap, it might distract your kids once or twice, but even then I'd say skip it.
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