Saturday 28 April 2018

Early Man

I'm an admirer of the Aardman team - whether it be their various Wallace and Gromit shorts, music videos like "Sledgehammer" and "My Baby Just Cares for Me" or their features like "Chicken Run", "Curse of the Wererabbit", "Pirates: Band of Misfits" or "The Sean the Sheep Movie". But this one's a bit of a dud. The setup of pitting prehistoric man against the bronze age could possibly pay off, but making their field of battle a soccer match and running a series of gags very specifically about soccer gave me little to hang onto. It doesn't help that few of the characters are particularly fleshed out - possibly comic sidekick boar Hognob (voiced by Nick Park) gets the best of it, but everybody else is rather thin. This is particularly disappointing for Maisie Williams, an actress I'm looking forward to seeing a lot more of, but who's given pretty much nothing at all to play.

Look, there are one or two decent sight gags here and there, and there is some affection for the Aardman style of big-teethed claymation. But this is pretty flat stuff.

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