By Matt Fowler
There’s nothing overtly wrong with Dreamworks Animation’s slick (from snail slime) new summer kid-pleaser, but for a movie about a speed-obsessed snail who – just go with it – enters the Indy 500, it sure does sit there. It’s easy, formulaic and light on laughs. But, for those dragged to see it by children, it won’t make you want to rub salt in your eyes. So it’s a faint fail or a faint pass, depending on your resilience.
Ryan Reynolds voices Theo – aka “Turbo” – a snail inexplicably determined to be as fast as a Nascar racer. As if you could hear it coming straight out of a pitch meeting. “Wouldn’t it be funny if a snail wanted to be fast? Because they’re so slow!” Paul Giamatti plays Turbo’s “isn’t the life we have just fine?” brother, Chet, who mostly shouts things like “It’s not natural!” and “That’s not what Mother Nature had in mind!” at Turbo so much that you come to realize, after 10 minutes, that the villain in this film is reality. And after endless bickering between a sourpuss and an contrived dreamer, you begin to resent both sides of the argument.