Hey, remember all those movies from the late 2000s where a vintage cartoon character is suddenly in extra realistic CGI, now a side character to a live action drama about corporate business deals and/or a workaholic father who needs to spend time with his family? Well, we've got one of those for Woody Woodpecker now, and he now belches, farts, and makes Hip Cool jokes about "swiping left" and ringtones and songs that are his "jam". It's a movie from 2017 that feels like it's from 2008.
I wasn't exactly expecting Fargo or something, but why are CGI family movies almost always this terrible? This film barely counts as family material...Woody outright tries to murder people via such schemes including electrocution, gas explosions, and pouring wet cement into an occupied car. He also defecates on people, with one character (unknowingly) eagerly eating it. A character remarks that she "needs a Xanny" in response to a loud kid. Woody's driving force for being the harbinger of chaos is just, "I don't want an artsy house near my tree, so it's time to get some humans almost killed." Multiple subplots come and go; the only one I cared about was how the lawyer's son joins a band to both prove himself and to help out some friends at a talent show. You may ask, "I thought this movie was about land development and paternal bonding. What talent show?" Well, just wait until you have to climb through the other subplots involving a black market for stuffed birds, Woody's entire species being extinct, two brothers who are poachers, a forest ranger trying to catch said poachers, a house fire with improperly-placed blame, a sickly father-in-law, a Xanax-popping interior decorator and her flimsy marriage, and a guitar. The morning after I watched this movie, I had trace memories of it, and thought, "Wait, that was real? That was a thing that I really watched? And it came out in 2017?!" This film is disjointed, and definitely not kid-friendly.
I can't imagine being a Woody Woodpecker fan and seeing this; it reminds me a lot of the film "Furry Vengeance" from 2010, albeit now with a talking bird shoving his bug-eyed, CGI face in the camera "Son of the Mask" style. I give this a 3/10 because the kid playing the lawyer's son gave a really good performance, and the ending song was catchy. Otherwise, just run away from this. So many better children's/family movies have come out in the past decade, so this film both has no reason being so bad, AND you owe it to your kids to put on something better.
