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By Leon van Nierop

Journalist


Turbo is too slow and steady

Sorry ladies: this is one of the first Ryan Reynolds movies where he doesn't take off his shirt. As a matter of fact, you won't see him at all.


He voices an animated snail called Theo, who has an impossible dream. So there is no danger of Mr. Reynolds becoming stereotyped. From hunk to snail!

Theo is a stubborn snail who wants to win the Indianapolis 500 motor race. He is tired of being mediocre and having his intelligence underestimated. So he tries to do the impossible, in 3D. You can already imagine the predictable jokes…

Turbo suffers from the same problem as so many other modern day animated features – a lack of originality. Okay, so the story of a slug trying to realize his inner James Hunt may be innovative, but the execution travels the same road as many other similar films and you feel that you have seen it all before, only better.

 

 

Which raises the problem: with the vast amount of animated films populating our cinemas nowadays, how can the genre develop and surprise? Great comedies like Ratatouille and Up and the masterpiece Toy Story 3 proved that it can still be done, but Turbo doesn’t fall into that league.

It is too ordinary, to mediocre to attract much attention. It also didn’t fare too well in America, which proves that audiences are becoming more selective and may prefer to show their kids classics on DVD than spending money on a new movie in a cinema. But kids, who may not have been exposed to the vast range of material that adults have seen over the years, might just enjoy ever slug-filled moment and getting away from the television screen.

Turbo is therefore okay for the little ones, but adults should come up with an excuse to watch something else.

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