‘Ratchet and Clank’ Arrives With A Clunk
Ratchet & Clank, the animated feature based on the PlayStation video game franchise created by Insomniac Games, opens in theaters today, with little fanfare and disastrous reviews.
The film launches in 2,890 screens courtesy of Gramercy Pictures, a subsidiary of Focus Features, whose parent company Comcast—NBCUniversal bought Dreamworks Animation earlier this week. (Focus is also the American distributor of Laika’s stop motion efforts.) The movie also debuts today in the UK, Spain, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Iceland, Middle East, and Vietnam.
Early comments from fans of the video game suggest that it’s fun for people with fondness for the characters, but film reviewers who are judging it on its cinematic merits have been wholly unimpressed. Eighty per cent of film reviewers have branded it rotten on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, at the time that this piece was written.
Soren Anderson of the Seattle Times compared the movie to “the screeching and shrieking” of an insufferable seven-year-old, while the NY Times’ Andy Webster complained that, “It has little story to tell and few ideas to offer.”
David Ehrlich wrote in Indiewire: “So profoundly bad that it represents the worst of two entirely different mediums, Ratchet & Clank doesn’t blur the line between movies and videogames so much as it flushes them both in a toilet and forces us to watch as they swirl together down the drain.”
Katie Walsh of the LA Times wrote: “Ratchet & Clank feels like watching four episodes of a Saturday morning cartoon mashed into a feature-length film. The basic dramatic score underlines this sense as well as the flat character design, overly busy editing and run-of-the-mill story.”
Directed by Kevin Munroe and co-directed by Jericca Cleland, Ratchet & Clank is expected to launch in the $5-8 million range in the United States. It could consider itself lucky if it beats this weekend’s gross of Zootopia, which is entering its 9th weekend.
The movie was produced by Vancouver-based Rainmaker Entertainment and Blockade Entertainment.