Movie Review – Turbo (2013)

Turbo, 2013

Directed by David Soren.
Featuring the voice talents of Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Michael Peña, Samuel L. Jackson, Luis Guzmán, Bill Hader, Snoop Dogg, Maya Rudolph, and Ben Schwartz.

SYNOPSIS:

A freak accident might just help an everyday garden snail achieve his biggest dream: winning the Indy 500.

If you thought Ryan Reynolds was annoying as an actor playing a human? Wait until you see him as a snail…

When you hear the plot, it doesn’t sound like a real movie – like a 5-year old telling you a story they’re making up as they go along. Reynolds voices Turbo, an ambitious garden snail who wants something more from life than the menial snail-tasks he has to do. He has one obsession: speed – something he is unfamiliar with because he’s a snail. Through a series of fairly convoluted events, Turbo ends up in the engine of a Fast and Furious-style street racer just as the nitrous oxide is injected which transforms him into a super fast speedy snail. After he and his brother Chet (voiced by Paul Giamatti) are thrown out of their snail clan, they end up being taken in by a racing snail enthusiast who uses Turbo’s new found gift to improve the sales of his flailing taco stand which he runs with his brother. With the help of the other racing snails, they then enter Turbo into the Indy 500 where he will race against his hero and idol Guy Gagne (Bill Hader) and finally achieve his dream.

To say that the plot of Turbo is stupid would be an understatement, but the most shocking thing about the movie is just how mundane and lifeless it is. It’s like director David Soren (who also co-wrote the screenplay) put Cars, A Bugs Life and Ratatouille into a blender and the end result was a racing snail movie that had none of the charm of the aforementioned films. Although, to its credit, it is less annoying than Cars. 

While the story is idiotic and mundane, its problem is that it has two points – snail becomes fast, snail enters race. Everything else that comes between, which is around 90% of the movie, is treated with the ‘it’s a kids movie so it’s not like you have to try’ mentality which further highlight’s the film’s lack of care when it comes to entertaining its audience. Even the idea of putting him in the Indy 500 is treated with the same degree of respect that Air Bud has for its viewers by lazily arguing “the rules don’t say that a dog can’t play basketball”. There is a nice mirroring of the brotherly love and the troubles that could come from a non-believing sibling, but that really is about it. To Soren’s credit, the racing scene at the end is very well directed and can be quite thrilling at times, but you have to get through a lot of dreadful jokes, forced dilemmas and bland characters to get there.

What doesn’t help the film either is the lack of effort put forward by its voice cast. Outside of Giamatti (which lets face it, is always great), it feels as though none of the cast really wanted to commit to the racing snail movie with Reynolds being the biggest culprit. As an actor, Ryan Renyolds has two modes – he either likes the movie/character so he’ll give a decent showing (Adventureland) or he doesn’t care and therefore doesn’t try (everything else). Just when you thought he couldn’t care any less than R.I.P.D., he puts in this amazingly bored performance as Turbo.

Turbo is not the worst movie to be put out by the Dreamworks factory, but it’s certainly in its bottom tier. It’s a mostly pointless movie with little to no emotion, passion or drive (no pun intended) and you’ll forget you saw it as soon as you leave the cinema. Kids might get something out of it as the movie looks great, but it’s more likely to keep them quiet as opposed to entertain them. When it seemed certain that Monsters University would be crowned the worst big-budget animated movie of the year, Turbo races in and takes the flag.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.