Somehow, the marriage of two singular film talents has produced the least special work either has ever done.
Streaming on Netflix Friday, the stop-motion animated feature “Wendell & Wild” comes from Jordan Peele, of “Get Out,” “Us” and “Nope,” and Henry Selick, whose “Coraline” is one of the most intriguing and fully realized animated movies of our century. Peele and Selick wrote the script of “Wendell & Wild” and Selick directed. (He also directed the movie everybody assumes Tim Burton directed, “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”)
This one’s considerably grimmer. Also occasionally trenchant. And persistently overplotted, in ways that knock heads with its simple, tragic starting point.
At age 8, Kat (voiced by Lyric Ross) loses both parents in a terrifying crash off a bridge in their hometown of Rust Bank. Blaming herself for their deaths, she endures some very rough years. The film picks up when Kat, now 13, transfers from a harsh reform school upstate to a Catholic institution located in what’s left of Rust Bank, a town holding nothing but bad memories for Kat.
All that’s up top. Down below, in Hell or thereabouts, a dark lord known as Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames) mistreats his unreliable demon sons Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Peele). Kat is their unsuspecting “Hell Maiden” — a sponsor, essentially — with the vaguely defined power to bring them above ground. There, at long last, they can fulfill their dreams of building the greatest amusement park ever.
There is so much more. Sinister conspiracy angle? A greedy redevelopment and private prison company, Klax Korp, wants to destroy Rust Bank for a massive private incarceration facility. Snot jokes? Wendell and Wild actually live inside Belzer’s massive hairy nostrils. Kate meantime navigates a maze of trouble at her new school, run by a corrupt and slippery priest (James Hong, ever a delight). He’s killed off soon enough but returns from the dead. Many do in Selick’s film.
There’s a serious core to it, and some typically provocative and clever metaphors at work. Kat must learn to give herself a break from a young lifetime of pure, heartbreaking self-hatred. Her demons happen to be literal demons. Yet the forces stacked up against Kat’s potential growth and happiness are all too human and familiar.
At one point in “Wendell & Wild,” which isn’t primarily focused on Wendell and Wild, Kat’s privileged “poodle” of a classmate, Siobhan, expounds on what she’s recently learned about the incarceration facility her evildoing parents have in mind for Rust Bank. (The increasingly knotty plot concerns, among other things, bringing deceased, pro-prison citizens back to life so they can vote for the Klax Korp project.)
The newly enlightened Siobhan says: “You make a pile of money of money for every prisoner you take. So you pack them in like sardines, provide crap food, crap medical, dangerous conditions and zero rehabilitation.” Yes, that’s the size of it, her parents coo. Now there’s a righteous riff you wouldn’t get in an “Ice Age” movie.
The film’s drawback, and it’s sizable, is that Kat remains dramatically monotonal and stuck in neutral while the narrative somersaults all over the place. The straight-up comedy feels uninspired; Key and Peele are fine voice talents but the material’s bland, and if they improvised much in the recording booth, I’d be surprised. The film delivers chaos and adversity by the barrel, but its crazier notions — W. and W. get high on hair cream, for one, and the hair cream can bring the dead back to life — rarely excite, or transport.
“Wendell & Wild” may not succeed, but I took heart from this: At least it doesn’t succeed in unconventional ways. That’s a sign of serious talents struggling with two of the most dreaded and unavoidable words in commercial cinema: “story problems.”
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‘WENDELL & WILD’
2 stars (out of four)
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some thematic material, violence, substance use and brief strong language)
Running time: 1:46
How to watch: On Netflix Friday
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