Key, Peele voice a bland comedy of a girl and her literal demons
Somehow, the marriage of two singular film talents has produced the least special work either has ever done.
Streaming on Netflix, 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 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 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, 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 power to bring them above ground. There, they can fulfill their dreams of building the greatest amusement park ever.
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.
Kat meantime navigates a maze of trouble at her new school, run by a corrupt priest (James Hong). 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 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 nor Wild, Kat’s privileged “poodle” of a classmate, Siobhan, expounds on what she’s learned about the incarceration facility her evildoing parents have in mind for Rust Bank. (The knotty plot concerns 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 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.
The film’s drawback is that Kat remains monotonal and stuck in neutral while the narrative somersaults all over the place. The comedy feels uninspired; Key and Peele are fine voice talents but the material’s bland. 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.
“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.”
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some thematic material, violence, substance use and brief strong language) Running time: 1:46
How to watch: Netflix