After a strong run of animated movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Walt Disney Animation Studio started going downhill. The quality and box-office both dropped until they were behind Pixar and Dreamworks. And, while I’d love to say that their newest film, Wreck-It Ralph, is a throwback to the great Disney movies, it isn’t.. It’s a decent enough movie that has some fun parts, but really is just a decent kids movie. Nothing exciting in the way that the Pixar movies are. And, for Disney, maybe that’s all they’re going to end up as, a studio that just makes decent kids cartoons. So, let’s check out what the movie is about.
John C. Reilly is Wreck-It Ralph, the bad guy who destroys buildings so that Fix-It Felix Jr (Jack McBrayer) can fix it up and be the hero. But now, 30 years later, Ralph is tired of not being appreciated for his part of the game. After a meeting of the villain support group, Bad-Anon, with cameos from other games (including Bowser, Clyde and Zangief), Ralph comes back to find that there is a party in his game for the 30th anniversary and he wasn’t invited…or wanted. He makes a deal that he gets to move into the penthouse of the building if he can get a medal. So Ralph sets out and ends up (after a stop in “root-beer” bar Tapper) in Hero’s Duty where he meets the lead hero, Sergeant Tamora Jean Calhoun (Jane Lynch). Ralph sneaks in and steals a medal, but accidentally gets attacked by one of the evil bugs. The fight between Ralph and the bug sends them both to a candy-coated race game called Sugar Rush, where 9 year old girls race along candy coated tracks. Ralph’s medal is stolen by Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) who uses it to pay her entrance into the race.
It turns out that Vanellope is a glitch and snubbed by the rest of the game. Ralph finds himself working with Vanellope to help her build and race a car, so that she can win the race and get Ralph his medal back. King Candy, the King of Sugar Rush, appeals to Ralph to not let Vanellope race. Since if she is able to enter the actual game, players will see her glitch and think the machine is broken. This would end the world for all who live in the game. So Ralph is torn between two competing desires and everything he is told is not what it seems (along with a fun use of the Konami Code).
Meanwhile Fix-It Felix Jr is out to find Ralph before their game is carted away and Sergeant Calhoun is on the hunt for the bug that escaped, before it can destroy the entire arcade.
When the movie is messing around with game tropes (such as the Grand Central Station like connection between the games) it is a fun movie. When they go to the plot, it drags and is a simple movie that doesn’t have anything beyond its paper-thin premise. The characters are bland and you can pretty much figure out what’s going to happen from the previews. It’s not a bad movie. There are some entertaining bits, but overall it’s just bland entertainment. Something that you laugh at today and forget about by the end of the week. Mildly recommended for the video game tropes.