Children will have fun and dog lovers are sure to adore it, but for the rest of us Bolt is nothing more than a formulaic passing interest. There are no twists, turns or yields you don’t see coming from a mile away and the film takes zero advantage of the advances in CGI animation presenting a flat palette just as uninteresting as the plot itself. To say I was bored would be an understatement as I was left to concentrate on the comfort of my 3-D glasses as I watched a film that wouldn’t be very interesting even if I was passing through a worm-hole to the fourth dimension.
Early trailers for Bolt now prove I should trust my gut more often as what I ultimately got on screen mirrored my original lackluster impression. Disney subsequently released the more entertaining bits from the film to draw in audiences, but what you don’t realize is that you have now seen the entire opening sequence as well as the funniest scene in the entire film. Disney realizes this, but they had to promise audiences something.
The story centers on a Hollywood action star pooch who doesn’t realize he isn’t the super-dog he thinks he is. Once a scene is done shooting the show runners quickly usher Bolt (voiced by John Travolta) back to his trailer where he spends time with his best friend and co-star Penny (voiced by Miley Cyrus). The obvious logic behind the entire premise is ridiculous, but since we are watching a film with talking dogs, cats, hamsters and pigeons you quickly learn to let it slide.
Things go wrong for Bolt when the final scene in the most recent episode has Penny being kidnapped by the evil Green-Eyed Man (voiced by Malcolm McDowell). Thinking “his human” was really kidnapped Bolt escapes from his trailer and sets out to save her. In the process he accidentally gets shipped to New York, meets a stray cat named Mittens and a comical hamster named Rhino and sets across the country to find Penny, and along the way learns he doesn’t have the super powers he thought he had.
Bolt reminds me a lot of the first Madagascar film in that it has a couple of really great supporting characters but the story is far from interesting. In Madagascar it was the penguins and in Bolt you have a great early scene with a trio of New Yawker pigeons and then you meet Rhino, whose comedic effect is lessened due to his over-exposure in the film’s marketing but he remains mildly entertaining nonetheless.
The film doesn’t benefit at all in the on-again/off-again relationship between Bolt and Mittens seeing how it is such a poorly conceived and uninteresting clash to start with resulting in the inevitable friendship with nothing in-between to get an audience to care. I was also shocked to see how far the film was actually willing to go to play on the audience’s emotion with a clichéd instance of a youngster in peril serving as the climax. If critics were harsh on the use of a putting a kid in danger in The Dark Knight I wonder what they will think of it when it serves as the emotional core of a PG-rated animated kid flick. It does its job, but it feels like such a last ditch effort to play on the audience’s natural instinct I thought it told a lot about how much the film had failed up to that point.
I am, of course, being harsh on this film from a critic’s perspective. As an animated kid flick it works and kids will be entertained and the parents will be happy they got them to be quiet for 90 minutes. To that end it serves its purpose. However, if Disney was hoping this would be a step up from their previous box-office blunder Chicken Little I don’t think they have gained much ground, and compared to 2007’s Meet the Robinsons it is actually a step back.
