Sing consistently off-key

Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) in Sing. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Sing opens on a particularly illogical and nonsensical note and never rights its course, opting to run through more 108 minutes of crass jokes, flatulence jokes and an overabundance of Seth MacFarlane to end with something miles away from heartfelt. Sing isn't much of a film, yet it somehow doesn't cross into abhorrent or awful either; it's just annoyingly bad, too lazy and uninspired to do much more than exist and crank out pop music covered by famous actors and aspiring singers.

None of this is really all that surprising. The studio responsible for this, Illumination, is known for producing this type of fair. It has one solid film in Despicable Me and a whole mess of whatevers, including this summer's mediocre Secret Life of Pets. It's an uninteresting studio designed to make lower-budget animated films like Sing and earn a hefty profit in the process, rarely caring for artistic merit, good storytelling or sophisticated jokes. The studio never aspires to be Pixar, Disney, Studio Ghibli or even DreamWorks, although its films cost the same amount at the cinema as the films by the other four. Not every film is going to be Toy Story 3, Moana, My Neighbor Totoro, or Chicken Run, but you'd hope a studio would chuck in a modicum of effort into producing films. Illumination, however, doesn't seem too interested in actually doing something with its animation quality, plot or characters, hitting the proverbial notes as needed to create an overstuffed pile of meh. In a year with a pair of legitimately great animated films and a few OK ones, Sing is just there, waiting for the money to roll in from viewers with little else to do on a December afternoon.  

Usually a film like Sing has a clever idea or some promise that isn't fulfilled, a redeeming quality just under the surface to be positive about. That is very much not the case. The premise, about a collection of anthropomorphic regular folks (voiced by Scarlett Johansson as a porcupine, Reese Witherspoon as a pig, Tori Kelly as an elephant, Taron Egerton as a gorilla, Nick Kroll as another pig and the aforementioned MacFarlene as a mouse) competing in a talent competition run by Matthew McConaughey as a koala with bad business sense, isn't innovative or interesting on its own. Not a fatal flaw if the writers find something interesting to say about it, which they do not. Excluding a bizarre subplot involving MacFarlane's awful mouse wannabe lounge singer, the film never veers off the boring characters take their chance at stardom, doubt themselves, then rise up again to put on a whopper of a performance because that would require some thought and nuance, concepts this film prefers to avoid.

Well, technically the film does make a viewer think about the inane insanity of the film universe. Much of the soundtrack consists of covers of songs like Shake It Off, Call Me Maybe, My Way, Hallelujah, and Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing. An underlying issue though is how these animals are singing these songs; the original artists are never mentioned in animal form, yet they are part of the fabric of the film universe. Is this some sort of universe in which animals have copies of popular music produced by humans? Were the humans conquered recently a la Planet of the Apes, their music, clothes and cars the only remnants of the pre-animal conquered world? Are there animal versions of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Stevie Wonder and Leonard Cohen (RIP) floating around this animal universe? Really, is there a reason to have animal characters instead of humans? The answer to the last point is a resounding no, besides maybe a cuteness factor that is unrelated to the plot, script or good storytelling techniques.

The closest Sing gets to finding some emotional resonance is at the end, amid the grand performance the animals had worked so hard to perfect despite all the bland and easily avoidable obstacles in their way. After Kelly's elephant rocks out to an uninspired cover of a great Stevie Wonder song, a slight chill ran through my body and I thought maybe this film has found a place in my heart. Then I remembered I had walked through a heavy rain in November to get to this screening and my clothes were still soaked. I continued to shiver, my only comfort being that I won't have to watch Sing again any time soon.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 108 minutes

Genre: Animated
 

Ask Away

Target audience: Families who can't get tickets to Rogue One.

Take the whole family?: The film gets lazy with a couple of fart jokes, but on the whole there isn't anything objectionable about the content besides the quality.

Theater or Netflix?: Wait for home if you must watch it.

What's the deal with Seth MacFarlene?: He is the one character who bugs me more than anything else in this film. While the other characters are at least trying to do something with their lives, MacFarlene's mouse is awful, never really interested in redeeming himself. That his crappy character also offers MacFarlene to indulge in his fantasies of being Sinatra (when he's at best a C- Bublé)  is all the more frustrating.

Watch this instead?: There's still an animated musical in theaters that is leagues better than this thing. It’s called Moana.