MOVIE: DC League of Super-Pets (2022)

DC League of Super-Pets Year: 2022 Rating: PG Length: 105 minutes / 1.75 hours I’ve never been a huge pet person because of allergies. As such, I initially passed on DC League of Super-Pets (2022) because it didn’t seem interesting to me (I also wasn’t wild about Kevin Hart or Dwayne Johnson as voice actors). Of course, with kids around, I eventually had the opportunity to watch this movie with them. Overall, it’s a pretty basic superhero movie that just happens to feature animals instead of humans. It has the usual jokes that adults would get and the silly little gags that appeal to children. Mostly, it’s just…there. Because it’s telegraphed that each of the pets eventually ends up with one of the members of the Justice League, I was hoping there was slightly more synergy between the animals/powers and the heroes they’d be matched with. Krypto (Dwayne Johnson) makes sense, but he already had a connection to Superman (John Krasinski). At the very least,...
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MOVIE: The Bad Guys (2022)

The Bad Guys Year: 2022 Rating: PG Length: 100 minutes / 1.67 hours I honestly love that computer technology has improved so much that animated movies like The Bad Guys (2022) don't have to use super-realistic visuals and can instead have a stylized animation that gives it a lot of personality. What's a little astonishing to me is how this film is the first animated movie I can think of that takes the "heist" genre and runs with it. I love a good heist, after all. And while the twists are a bit obvious and the moral is a bit hokey, The Bad Guys is still a lot of fun. There's no reason to blame The Bad Guys for making a movie that children can figure out. It's loosely based on a series of children's books, so I get that some twists are going to be obvious to the adults in the audience. The thing that strikes me weird is that all the characters that...
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