Wendell & Wild (2022)

Directed by Henry Selick. Starring (voices) Lyric Ross, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Angela Bassett, Sam Zelaya, David Harewood, Maxine Peake, James Hong, Ving Rhames, Gary Gatewood, Gabrielle Dennis, Tamara Smart, Igal Naor, Michele Mariana. [PG-13]

Rebellious teenage orphan Kat becomes a “Hell Maiden”, capable of summoning a pair of goofy demons named Wendell and Wild to the land of the living so they can resurrect her parents. Meanwhile, the greedy owners of Klaxon Korp want to use the demons’ dead-raising powers (from Wendell & Wild’s father’s hair cream, no less!) to revive “voters” so they can move forward with the construction of a private prison purely for the profits. A spirited, visually-imaginative tale, but stuffed to the gills with supporting characters, story threads, and exposition/logisitics trying to explain the paranormal rules and different worlds—it may be easy to follow, but it’s hard to keep up, and somehow, the momentum continuously stalls even though a lot of the action and storytelling feels rushed. Flawed fun with a busy, detailed landscape worth attention—maybe an animated series that could take the time to creep around the corners would work? Voicing Wendell & Wild’s Falstaffian demon pops, Rhames goes the sonorous route for the characterization, so don’t be surprised if you keep waiting in vain for him to mention “the meats” from Arby’s. Screenplay by Peele and director Selick, from an unpublished novel the latter penned with Clay McLeod Chapman; Selick, of course, got his breakthrough in animation with Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, but it’s an earlier Burton picture that gets stylistically quoted/homaged at several junctures: Beetlejuice.

61/100