by Jeffery Rahming, Contributing Writer
When you hear about a movie where Anthony Mackie and Chloe Bailey play talking sneakers, how do you feel? Does it interest you or excite you? If you’re like most of the world, the answer is a resounding no, and that answer leads to another question. Why does Sneaks exist? That’s the only question that can be asked after a movie like this wastes an hour and a half of your life.
Bailey and Mackie play two sneakers, Ty and Maxine, who are won in a contest by human boy Edson (Swae Lee). Unfortunately, a greedy shoe collector, aptly named The Collector (Laurence Fishburne), wants those shoes for his own benefit, and steals them away from Edson. Ty and Maxine end up separated in the kidnapping. Now the two shoes must find their way back to each other: Ty from the rough-and-tumble streets, and Maxine in the pristine dungeon of The Collector’s shoe display.
What you have here is a copy of the Pixar formula, with none of Pixar’s budget or heart. The anthropomorphic shoe idea borrows a lot from both Cars and Toy Story (the shoes even “play dead” when humans walk into the room, like the toys do). Like many animated movies, the voice cast features high-profile names who all seem like they should be doing something else. Even though their voices are coming out of what I can only describe as CGI monstrosities attempting to resemble shoes, the voice acting in Sneaks is quite great. The script is just a collection of hit-or-miss jokes and random events loosely held together by the thinnest of plots. The voice actors are good enough to almost make you believe it’s a good one. Mackie and Bailey do a great job of endearing you to the rather flimsy characters through their sheer charisma. Martin Lawrence also has a surprisingly heartfelt turn as J.B., a street sneaker who takes Ty under his wing. Even rapper Quavo is unrecognizable as Spike, a depressed and lonely shoe trapped with Maxine.
But with the cast pulling most of the weight, one wonders if the money spent on its star-studded cast could have been better spent ensuring the movie didn’t look like watching a PlayStation 1 cutscene. The animation is rough, to say the least. If it were consistently bad, that would be one thing, but the quality fluctuates significantly between frames. One moment, the scene looks reasonably fine; the next, it looks like someone forgot to render the footage all the way. It’s hard to stay engaged when the characters suddenly seem to lose the soul behind their eyes at random times or when they’re slightly floating away mid-conversation. These critiques can’t be placed solely at the hands of the animators. This whole film looks like it was made for 100 dollars and a pizza, and I’m sure even the pizza went to Fishburne. Everything just feels like a half-effort.
Kids might get a few laughs, and the cast’s performance makes it better than absolute straight-to-DVD garbage, but Sneaks is undeniably awful — the kind of bad that makes you feel a little sorry for everybody involved. A failure, to be sure, but not one without its moments. It’s ridiculous enough to firmly go into so-bad-it’s-good territory. Five years from now, YouTubers will make fun of it and ask how and why it got made. For now, I think it’s better for us to forget this ever happened.
Rating: Didn’t Like It
Sneaks is currently playing in theaters
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