Oh dear. This is NOT good. No one sets out to make a bad movie. I can appreciate what I presume was an earnest intent to make a fun little something starring Tony Hawk, the only name in "extreme sports" that might be recognized by someone who isn't into extreme sports, and centering skateboarding. But nothing here comes off well. From top to bottom 'Boom Boom Sabotage' is weak and dull, and there's simply no fun to be had here.
I don't specifically blame Mainframe Entertainment for how the picture looks. The character designs are ghastly, but I assume they are simply what someone ordered up. Those characters as they appear, and pretty much the entirety of any background or environmental elements, lack any detail or texture, however, and that is far more substantively troubling; the world of the film is all too empty of any vitality, any minutiae to make it feel real and believable. Even the movements of characters are decidedly blocky and unnatural, to the point that I can only suppose the "motion capture" technology that the production had to work with was minimal, and possibly not even up to the standards of 2006. With all this said, I recognize that Mainframe has been involved with some well-regarded features and TV shows, and while the familiarity I can claim with such works is variable at best, I can still see a kinship between those and this. I don't know if that really helps the title's case, however, for the animation seems outdated, not to mention subpar, like graphics for a second- or third-tier first-generation PlayStation game. Even from a fundamental standpoint of the visuals this is highly dubious.
Brian Carson's music feels like a bare-bones representation of skater-oriented "punk rock" - definitely generic, maybe blandly imitative, and at best merely the foundation of what an earnest take might be. The voicework is modest at best, and with the direction the actors were given, sometimes altogether raises a skeptical eyebrow for how nonplussed it is. The sequencing and editing is distinctly questionable at some points, making me wonder what Jordan Atkinson, Sylvain Blais, or Logan McPherson were actually doing. And, well, then there's the script. Rarely - glaringly, appallingly rarely - there are infinitesimal fragments of ideas of what might have been a clever joke or gag. These are overwhelmed and outnumbered beyond count by jokes or gags that are too childish to elicit laughter from a pre-teen child, not to mention jokes or gags that are so feeble that they completely fall flat and are direly unfunny. The dialogue is pretty hackneyed generally, and while the story ideas are broadly serviceable, I must heavily accentuate the word "broadly": if someone were to take a survey of all the kids' movies, episodes of TV shows, and general comedy films that effectively followed the same plot, I can only imagine the number would be huge.
Adding insult to injury, there are many instances throughout these seventy minutes where the scene writing is just a meager excuse for more skateboarding. This might (key word) be more acceptable if we were getting live-action footage of skateboarders at work, but the fact that this is all animated makes the notion less interesting. Then consider how unimpressive the animation is at large, and how stilted and unnatural the motion capture animation is particularly, and the inclusion just feels woefully ill-advised. Yet the screenplay is so insistent on skateboarding that our youthful heroes even take several minutes of the runtime to pull tricks in their surroundings at a time when they are very emphatically supposed to be looking for clues to solve their quandary. What?
There's a single named, identifiable female character, and when the picture gives us characters who aren't white, the incidence is so brazenly overblown that it feels like a stereotype, or caricature. Much of what is wrong with 'Boom Boom Sabotage' could perhaps be chalked up to a low budget, and very limited means to create the ideal version of what it could have been. And I don't believe for one moment that anyone involved ever intended for this to go the way that it did. This doesn't change the fact that there are flagrantly bad ideas characterizing this mess, and poor work that seems substandard even by the standards of 2006, let alone seventeen years later. I think (but do not know or assert) that I wish only the best for those who participated in this creation, and hope that they've done more and better things since. Yet let's be frank: no matter what it is you're hoping to get out of 'Boom Boom Sabotage,' there is no entertainment to be found here. I sincerely doubt that there has ever been one person to watch this and truly enjoy it. Just don't bother.
