"The Angry Birds Movie" Review

Your favorite smartphone app from 2011 finally has its own feature-length animated movie! And to be honest, it isn't nearly as godawful as expected. It's not great either, but Sony Pictures Animation's The Angry Birds Movie proves to be a colorful, consistently hilarious, early-Summer diversion.

If you're wondering how they ever made a story out of Angry Birds, here's the gist - Red (voiced by Jason Sudeikis) has problems controlling his temper. After blowing up at a child's birthday party, Judge Peckinpah (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) sentences Red to anger management classes where he meets Chuck (voiced by Josh Gad) and Bomb (voiced by Danny McBride). In the throes of their rehabilitation, the birds' idyllic island is visited by a band of boisterous pigs from across the sea. Led by their king, Leonard (voiced by Bill Hader), the pigs quickly assimilate with the birds. This seems fishy to Red, who stumbles on the pigs' plot to distract the birds and steal their eggs. When an inquiry with the bird hero Mighty Eagle (voiced by Peter Dinklage) proves fruitless, it's up to Red, Chuck, Bomb, and the rest of the birds to hatch a rescue mission to retrieve the eggs from Piggy Island.

I was surprised to find that the film lends more of itself to character development and story than trying to recreate gameplay. Although we get some of that during the gonzo third act, I found myself caring more about Red's redemption and how the filmmakers cleverly and humorously integrate "angry" into the solution. That isn't to say that anger and violence are always the answer, or that outsiders should never be trusted, but let's be honest. This is The Angry Birds Movie based on an iPhone game. On principle alone, one should have an easy time suspending disbelief.

I think the film's biggest issue is that it doesn't manage to contribute anything meaningful to the animated movie canon. It lacks the brains to afford it a place alongside Pixar's finest and features a couple of extremely crude jokes that don't need to be in a movie marketed to 6, 7 and 8 year olds. Granted, one of them made me laugh harder than I have in a while, but the film is packed with enough cheeky sight gags and puns that some inessential laughs could've probably afforded to fly the coop.

The voice acting is generally solid, with one very curious standout. During the opening titles, you'll notice the name "Sean Penn" at fifth or sixth billing. I said to myself "They got freaking Sean Penn for The Angry Birds Movie?" IMDb confirms this is THE Sean Penn. He plays a character called Terence, who is like Red on steroids. Fans of the game should place him as "the big brother bird" or, as I call him, the giant, heavy, wrecking-ball bird. Terence is also in the anger management program with Red, Chuck, and Bomb. Terence spends the entire movie sitting there grumbling. Talking about beginning-to-end hilarity, this joke didn't hit me until after I left the theater: Sony must've given THE Sean Penn $1 million to literally walk into a sound booth and growl. This may be the film's biggest joke of all.

So is The Angry Birds Movie essential? Not by a long shot, but it's here now and can never be erased from this world. It's not as clever a piece of commercial art as something like The Lego Movie, but it offers plenty of laughs and some dazzling animation. You could do worse.

B-