POLAR SQUAD / CERT: U / DIRECTOR: AARON WOODLEY / SCREENPLAY: BOB BARLEN, CAL BRUNKER, BRYAN THOMPSON, AARON WOODLEY / STARRING: JEREMY RENNER, HEIDI KLUM, JOHN CLEESE, ALEC BALDWIN, ANGELICA HOUSTON, JAMES FRANCO, OMAR SY, MICHAEL MADSEN / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Arctic fox Swifty works in the mailroom of a courier service, but longs for the respect of being the one to make the deliveries, an important role in the polar wilderness. When he stumbles upon the plan of mad scientist Otto Von Walrus that will melt all of the region’s ice, he and his misfit friends set out to prevent the end of their world.
Children’s animation has a long tradition of weaving life lessons in simple stories, exposing kids to things important for them to know about via a medium that renders them straightforward enough to take in. There are several such issues that Polar Squad (also known as Arctic Justice and Arctic Dogs, just to make things unnecessarily confusing) touches on, such as the dangers of climate change, arbitrary rules that deny people opportunities through no fault of their own, the difficulties faced when living in a remote location, and the ever-important message of embracing what’s special about yourself and figuring out how best to utilise it. The problem is that they are only ever briefly addressed, leaving nothing but a flat and uninspiring story for the rest of it that utterly wastes its impressive voice cast. Marketing for the film makes it sound like a ragtag bunch of anthropomorphic arctic animal losers banding together to battle a megalomaniacal walrus, and if that was in any way accurate to what the film actually is, it might have at least been fun.
The illogical behaviour of many characters is grating, especially when it becomes apparent that each is only acting in a certain way because this is what the plot demands of them at that particular given moment, regardless of how nonsensical or unprompted their actions and thoughts are. Similarly, the story hits several familiar beats as it progresses, but it feels as though they have been copied from the plots of other films without understanding how best to incorporate them at organic junctures, instead just crowbarring them in at jarring moments because there was nowhere else to put them.
Various aspects of the film echo the likes of Zootropolis, Despicable Me and Monsters, Inc, but rather than affording the film lofty contemporaries, it only serves to remind you how good each of those other movies were and thus highlight how inferior this one is in comparison. Most crucially for a kids’ film, although the tone is light-hearted the movie is not particularly funny, with some of the humour even descending to bad puns and fart jokes.
Polar Squad begins well and had the potential to be a meaningful, if flawed, exploration of the importance of teamwork and ambitious optimism, but its swift descent into unimaginative tedium leaves you as cold as the arctic its events are set against.
