Ratchet & Clank: What Happened?

RATCHET & CLANK

DIRECTED BY: Kevin Munroe

STARRING: James Arnold Taylor, David Kaye, Paul Giamatti, John Goodman, Bella Thorne, Rosario Dawson, Sylvester Stallone

GENRE: Animated, Science Fiction, Action, Comedy

YEAR: 2016

COUNTRY: United States, Canada

Ratchet and Clank tells the story of two unlikely heroes as they struggle to stop a vile alien named Chairman Drek from destroying every planet in the Solana Galaxy. When the two stumble upon a dangerous weapon capable of destroying entire planets, they must join forces with a team of colorful heroes called The Galactic Rangers in order to save the galaxy. Along the way they’ll learn about heroism, friendship, and the importance of discovering one’s own identity.

The plot is so mangled it almost defies summary. There’s a smirking cat-thing called Ratchet (voiced, as in the games, by James Arnold Taylor), who ditches his starship mechanic business to join the Galactic Rangers: a crime-fighting posse led by a barrel-chested egotist called Captain Qwark (Jim Ward), who’s heavily reminiscent of the cult comic-book character The Tick.

One of the games’ unique selling points is the array of gimmicky weapons used by Ratchet in battle (one, the Sheepinator, turns foes into ewes). Many of these are crowbarred en masse into the film’s final action sequence, which aims for madcap extemporization but delivers floundering incoherence.

Ratchet & Clank could have been assembled entirely from clips from other movies, and would have been better if it had been. This is a lot of noise and nonsense, colorful idiocy good for nothing more than being an electronic babysitter for especially undemanding toddlers, utterly charmless and unfun.  One of the film’s associated production companies, whose logo proudly appears at the beginning of the film, is “Cinema Management Group,” which sounds more like an organization that determines the optimal rate of Bags of Factory-Popped Popcorn-Flavored Snack Per Mean Moviegoer at the Average Multiplex than one that has anything interesting to contribute to a well-told story.

PROS:

• Amount of weapons in finale.

CONS:

• Simply put…everything else.

SCORE: 3.0 / 10

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