First, the positivity: the direct-to-Disney+ film Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, a sort of update-reboot-remake of the 1989 cartoon TV show of the same name, is so much better than I expected it to be. It's still bad in many ways and good in virtually none, but the standard of comparison here is 2021's Space Jam: A New Legacy, and compared to that, Rescue Rangers is altogether digestible. Its meta-humor isn't nearly so self-negating, its hideous CGI makeover of a formerly hand-drawn animated character generally less appalling, its pandering collection of pre-existing IP designed around an actual narrative goal, and not just "here are things we own. You will recognise them and have an appropriate emotional reaction". Heck, the IP in question isn't even solely owned by Disney, so there's at least some reason to assume that these were screenwriting decisions and not strictly a business maneuver.

To be clear, "recognise a thing, experience a simulation of a positive emotion as a result of that recognition" is certainly part of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, maybe even the biggest part. "Hey, remember the Rescue Rangers TV show?" isn't merely a response the film hopes to trigger, it is one of the drivers of the story. The idea here is that children's television cartoons weren't drawn by animators, but acted by performers who happen to be animated animals - the Who Framed Roger Rabbit scenario, in a nutshell, and goodness gracious, if this film isn't just indecently hungry to make us think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in basically every detail - and two of those performers were chipmunks Chip (John Mulaney) and Dale (Andy Samberg), who met as kids in school and marched through the Hollywood trenches together. Eventually, they were given a chance to star in their own half-hour series, playing fearless crimefighters; Dale was irritated by how everyone seemed to regard Chip as the creative genius, and ended up killing the show when he made a failed attempt to branch out on his own. Thirty-ish years later, Chip has retired to work in insurance, and Dale is barely making ends meet on the convention circuit, alongside a bunch of other living flotsam and jetsam of 1990s popular culture. Dale has been thinking about trying to pitch some kind of reboot of the old show, but do that, he needs Chip, and he can't even convince Chip to talk to him these days. Then a kidnapping mystery happens.

The plot is fully worked out and all, involving Chip and Dale reuniting in the home of their old co-star, Monterey Jack (Eric Bana), a barely-ambulatory cheese addict up to his eyeballs in debt to the cartoon mob, and from there discovering a disturbing pattern of missing cartoon stars that leads to a ring of underground animation DVD bootleggers - bootleg DVDs! here in 2022! That's almost as much a nostalgia trip as '90s afternoon cartoons - that's being overseen by a slovenly, gone-to-pot Peter Pan, now going by "Sweet Pete" (Will Arnett). And if there is one specific character in the entire 99-year history of Disney animation that one should probably avoid portraying as a falling-apart, drugged-out burned-out bum who's gotten involved in shady moneymaking schemes, I think it's probably the one who was voiced by Bobby Driscoll, a child actor who was kicked to the curb by Disney after puberty wiped out his childish cuteness, turned to hard drugs by the time he was 20, and was dead at 31 of heart failure. But I don't imagine that's part of the meta-humor we're supposed to be thinking of.

Truth be told, I'm surprised Peter Pan is in the film's frame of reference at all: this is pretty strictly about late-'80s/early-'90s nostalgia, with a few specific cultural reference points extending all the way up to 2020's Sonic the Hedgehog, which gets referenced a couple of times in a running gag about the evolution of terrible CGI. And if I were a film that had such whiffy cel-shaded CGI to represent my "hand-drawn" characters, and such downright gross CGI to represent my CGI characters, I should be a little leery about throwing shade at all the other CGI out there. But anyway, the film's reference pool is very strictly "older Millennials", people just tiny bit younger than 44-year-old director Akiva Schaffer and 43-year-old Samberg, and maybe exactly the same age as 39-year-old Mulaney; it's so disinterested in looking earlier than that, it doesn't even register (not even for a bad joke!) that Chip and Dale were pre-existing cartoon characters who preceded the creation of the Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers TV show by nearly a half-century.

The writing, credited to Dan Gregor & Doug Mand, but one imagines that Schaffer and Samberg dressed it up a bit, is functional to the point of feeling a bit dead. Setting aside whether "here is a reference to a thing!" is the same as "joke writing" - I would say no, but that battle was lost a long time ago - Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers is compromised by a bad habit that dominates bad comedy writing these days: it cannot just let a joke be funny. It has to be sure we notice that the joke is funny, and then goes even further by sometimes wondering if it should explain why the joke is funny. And to the credit of everyone involved, some of these jokes are funny. As part of a broad-range attack on movies that exist solely to jam identifiable properties together (see, because it knows it's doing this, it must be "subversive", or whatever dumb shit people try to say when they're defining this kind of witless self-mockery as being actually clever), the film sometimes shows billboards of very awful-looking mash-ups. It's cute - not fall-on-you-ass-laughing funny, but cute. And then, it makes sure we notice: Chip sees a billboard for Batman vs. E.T., and muses aloud how goofy that looks. After which, noticing that the joke is still twitching, we actually see Chip in his apartment, weeping as he watches the film in question. And hey, cool for Disney's lawyers that they got Warner Bros. and Amblin Entertainment to sign off on that. It's still a bummer to watch a joke shrivel up and die like that, right before our eyes. We could replay that with a lot of things - the chipmunks are bad at rapping, which somehow becomes the only joke for a two-minute scene (and while I get that this is the work of two-thirds of the Lonely Island, we're a long way from the likes of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping); CGI in old video games was pretty janky, which requires multiple conversations to dig into it. The film refuses to let anything breathe. And one could say, "well, it's a children's movie", but other than the inherent kid-friendly charms of talking animated animals, I think that Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers must be altogether impenetrable for a viewer who wasn't alive and paying attention in the first half of the 1990s. Certainly, it is not making any effort at all to appeal to such a person.

So the comedy writing is kind of lousy; the execution of that comedy is kind of lousy as well. Mulaney and Samberg are not, shall we say, natural-born voice actors, and their nasal, almost indistinguishable Chip and Dale are tedious, droning company. It's especially bizarre, since there is absolutely no other legacy character in the entire film presented the way they are, as an "actor" with a personality and voice different from the "character" they played on TV; there's one joke where the chipmunks start arguing and their voices rise in pitch to the characteristic squeaking that have always defined the characters, with actual voice actors Tress MacNeille and Corey Burton getting about 15 seconds' of work in reprising their old roles. Otherwise, they've been flattened into "John Mulaney (if John Mulaney was a cartoon chipmunk)" and "Andy Samberg (etc.)", and it the most wholly unengaging, sonically beige thing imaginable, with no sincerity, only a kind of blandly smug knowingness that is the death of humor.

And then add in the inexcusably bad marriage of animation and live-action footage, as well as the half-assed cel shading that almost makes the "hand-drawn" characters look hand-drawn, some of the time, and the whole thing is just desperately, crushingly mediocre. But only mediocre, and for what amounts to a catalogue of Disney showing off what IP they own, and what IP they were able to rent, that's kind of actually admirable.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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