DC League of Super-Pets
The plot is fairly one-dimensional, and the ‘life lessons’ to be learned are fairly obvious, but the natural talents of the voice-cast make this animated comedy surprisingly watchable, meaning there’s enough for the adults in the audience to find amusing while the younger viewers are kept entertained.
Premise: Superman’s dog Krypto (voiced by Dwayne Johnson) has to train a group of empowered animal shelter pets (including Ace, voiced by Kevin Hart) after the criminal mastermind guinea pig Lulu (voiced by Kate McKinnon) takes out the entire Justice League.
Review:
I’ll be perfectly honest here and say that my expectations for this film were pretty low based on the trailers, but the good news is, the film was actually better than I was expecting. Don’t get me wrong, the plot is still wafer thin, and even for a kids’ movie, the ‘life lessons’ are glaringly obvious – but what unexpectedly elevated the material was the calibre of the voice-cast.
Front and centre are Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, as the super-powered Krypto and the abandoned dog Ace. This film marks their fifth collaboration, and the pair clearly not only enjoy working together, but they also have a great onscreen comedic dynamic. Their easy back-and-forth, odd-couple dialogue adds comedic weight, and even a little emotional weight, to what could otherwise have been fairly forgettable dialogue on the page.
“…Kate McKinnon’s comedic performance was the highlight of the film…”
That said, for me the MVP of the movie is unquestionably Kate McKinnon as the voice of Lulu, the megalomaniacal guinea pig genius who is set on world domination. I could be doing co-writers John Whittington and Jared Stern a huge disservice, but the relaxed, off-the-cuff way in which Kate McKinnon delivers most of her best lines certainly gave me the impression that a lot of her dialogue was improvised by her. Her comedic performance was the absolute highlight of the film for me, and she elicited genuine chuckles from me throughout the movie.
And although Johnson, Hart and McKinnon are the core of the movie, they are surrounded by a surprising number of big names in the smaller, supporting roles. John Krasinski may not get to do a great deal in his role as Superman, but Keanu Reeves was an inspired choice to voice Batman, and he gets probably more funny moments than any of the other human characters.
“…has more genuinely funny lines than it has any right to…”
On the animal side of the cast, Diego Luna, Natasha Lyonne and Vanessa Bayer round out the rest of the Super-Pets team, although they don’t get as many stand-out comedic moments as Lulu’s hench-guinea-pigs Keith and Mark, voiced by Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz, do. Again, the fact that the professional comedians appear to have all of the funniest lines does suggest that they may have been improvising lines, like I suspect McKinnon was.
Of course, whoever takes credit for the lines, the end result is the same – and in this case, the end result is a film that has more genuinely funny lines than it has any right to. Younger viewers should love the action elements of the plot, but what surprised me was that the comedic elements made this a far more watchable kids’ film than I was expecting.
