Planes is an abomination wrapped inside a bullshit party. That’s
really all I want to write about this endless crap festival of a film
but since this is a review, I’m supposed to keep going. AND I SHALL.
Planes is an abomination wrapped inside a bullshit party. That’s
really all I want to write about this endless crap festival of a film
but since this is a review, I’m supposed to keep going. AND I SHALL.
The first question one asks oneself when walking out of Planes is,
“What in the fuck just happened?” The next question is, “What
happened to Pixar?” The answer is, nothing happened to Pixar. This
was not a Pixar film, though Disney doesn’t want you to know that, as
every ad, billboard, and toy makes it seem the movie is an extension
of Pixar’s Cars.You know Cars, it’s the movie every parent has to
watch 10,000 times with their child. And it’s a good movie. t
contains every element that is not in Planes. Humor, sadness, love,
friendship, learning lessons, and finding out what’s important about
life. Planes is what happens if a psychopath who can’t feel emotions
makes a film by watching Cars and tries to duplicate the experience.
My son owns every toy car from the movie Cars because he loves the
characters in the film. For the first time ever, my son does not want
a toy from a kind of Pixar movie. That toy is Dusty Crophopper – the
unlovable, unremarkable, paint by numbers, obvious, hacky, pointless,
boring, voiced by Dane Cook plane. And it’s the lead character. Dane
Cook manages to take bland dialogue and make it worse. It’s an
incredible achievement to get me to take out my smartphone in a
crowded theater to look up IMDb to see who is doing such a horrendous
job of voicing the lead character in a cartoon. It’s even more
maddening to learn from an insider that Dane Cook was brought in a couple
months before the movie was released to record over Jon Cryer’s voice.
Because what this boring movie was missing was a void.
The plot is straight out of an old cartoon. Literally, it is the plot
of an old 1933 cartoon called The Air Race. Notice I wrote 1933.
That’s the last time anyone gave a shit about airplane races and with
good reason. Unlike car races, airplane races don’t continue until
someone wins. They fly and stop and fly and stop and fly and stop
across the globe. That structure means one should not make a movie by
copying Cars, a movie about a car stuck in a small town. Unless of
course, you think children enjoy watching movies about planes talking
to their plane friends over a phone at every stop. But this movie is
not about filmmaking, it is about merchandising. It may be the most
cynical movie I have seen in years, and yes, I saw the new Superman. Every
character is an attempt to copy a character from Cars but in plane
form. There is no thought put into how friendships are created,
emotional arcs, or motivation.
And that’s not even the worst part! Skipper is an old World War 2 vet
in Dusty’s small town. He’s a hero – even though he has a dark secret
that is not at all dark secret. It’s more of a “Who gives a shit?” secret.
However, they needed to find a secret like Doc had in Cars, so they
desperately crammed one in. Anyway, when the secret is exposed,
Skipper tells Dusty what happened and we cut to horrendous flashback.
A squadron of planes being shot down in a sea battle. Plane after
plane explodes in flames and plummets into the sea, and every parent
in the theater has a young child look at them and say, “What happened
to those planes, Daddy?” And the parent doesn’t know what to say
because moments ago they were watching a boring yet harmless movie
about airplanes and now those planes are dying horrible, flaming
deaths for no reason. One of my friend’s was so taken aback and upset
by the carnage he said, “I don’t fucking know, it was a mistake.”
Disney: Now getting parents to swear at their kid from shock.
The movie eventually ends, in the same way a person’s life ends after
they’ve been bit by a poisonous snake while hiking alone in the
desert. Finally, the body no longer can move forward to find help,
and it collapses in the hot sun, rolls over, and looks up. The hot
sun rays brutally burn the skin, the lips chap and flake, and the eyes
dry out. Breathing becomes labored. The body defecates on itself,
now unable to control any muscles. One final thought enters the mind
before death. “Thank God this is finally over.” That’s the same
thought one has when Planes ends.
Thank God this is over.
Dave Anthony