Spies in Disguise review: Will Smith's bird-brained Bond pastiche will have kids giggling for weeks
Dirs: Nick Bruno, Troy Quane; Starring: Will Smith, Tom Holland, Ben Mendelsohn, Karen Gillan, Rashida Jones, Masi Oka, DJ Khaled (voices). PG cert, 102 mins.
With the Ice Age franchise effectively slush, so dawns a new era at Blue Sky Studios. Enter, from wherever you least expected to see him, Lance Sterling: a suave super-spy voiced by Will Smith, and the hero of this doggedly funny CG animation with an avian twist. After being framed as a double agent, Sterling turns for help to Walter Beckett, a nerdy underling voiced by Tom Holland – who obliges by using his latest invention to turn him into a pigeon. Call it The Spy Who Doved Me: a body swap comedy pushed to unusually daft extremes, even by the standards of the form.
Sterling may lose his weaponry, gadgety, and even suavity as a result of the switch: of his impeccably pressed tuxedo, just a feathery dickie-bow remains. Yet in the quest to clear his name, his newfound skillset proves a boon. Brad Copeland and Lloyd Taylor’s script, which was adapted extremely loosely from the 2009 animated short Pigeon: Impossible, bounces Sterling and Walter all over the world in the trusty James Bond tradition, from an opening in a snowbound Japanese castle to a Mexican beach resort and a climactic showdown in Venice, a mecca for pigeons since time immemorial.
More importantly, it comes up with something exciting and visually dazzling for them to do in each location, including a child-friendly take on the Crazy 88 sword fight from Kill Bill, and a chase across multiple tiers of a glamorous hotel that unfolds like an Olympic-class platforming video game.
Blue Sky’s films might have only rarely equaled Pixar’s for profundity or Disney’s for spectacle: 2011’s Rio and 2015’s The Peanuts Movie are perhaps the two that showed the studio at its best. But as the Ice Age titles’ manic Scrat the Squirrel interludes made clear, they have a rare talent for Looney Tunes slapstick; an inbuilt sense of the rhythms and ideas that elevate a string of biff-bang-pows into the kind of riotous set-piece that has children giggling on and off for weeks.
There are many such sequences here – arguably, the entire film is one – but a favourite at the screening I attended involves a sumo-sized baddie being bullseyed with a sedative so powerful it transforms him into a kind of fleshy water bed. It’s a nice idea rendered uproarious by the sheer wobbly perfection of the animators’ craft. The trio of actual pigeons who befriend the pigeon-ised Sterling are also a treat: innately funny in the way cartoon animals should be, and cute too, even though one looks like a feathery toilet brush and the other a skittle.
A moral about nonviolent conflict resolution is just about relevant enough to not feel perfunctory – Walter’s arsenal of gadgets is pointedly weapon-free – but the film is essentially all sugar, no fibre, with no food for thought. Still, in the Christmas holidays it seems all right to indulge.
Spies in Disguise is released in UK cinemas on Boxing Day
