Woody Woodpecker

....then as an adult, would i? she watched it for 10 minutes and she picked up her Lego toys,started playing with it,completely ignorant of the movie. sheesshhhh!!!!

As a fan of the cartoon, one of my favorites of all my life, I expected more for the first live-action version of the Woody Woodpecker. The result is a bit disappointing. Woody Woodpecker's first movie resulted in a silly, uninspired film with very poor acting. The good things are just the funny situations created by Woody and his characteristic laughter that animated my mornings in childhood and adolescence.

It's because it stinks. The acting stinks (Tim Omundson manages to be somewhat ok, but his character is empty and moronic). The music stinks. Woody Woodpecker's character and voicer is annoying, vapid, and obnoxious. Everything and everyone is see through and one dimensional. Universal was like,what's the crappiest thing we can do with a beloved character? Oh I know, let's butcher it with lazy writing and worse production. Good grief it stinks.

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.

I'm not a fan of Woody the Woodpecker, although I do remember watching a couple of cartoons revolving around the character when I was a kid. But I do understand how certain people are fond of that lovable woodpecker. So, wouldn't you know it, Hollywood decided to make a live action/cgi adaptation of said character and so far it falls I the same category of movie adaptations of classic cartoon characters not being very good. But that's not why I decided to watch it on Netflix a few days ago. The only reason is because I was expecting something that would at least have some effort. Unfortunately, it turned out to be very mediocre. It's marginally better than the terrible live action Death Note film back in 2017, but its still not very good.

The story is juvenile and above all predictable with several cliches we've seen before which I'm not going to spoil, the writing is complete garbage with only one or two moments that are funny but the rest of the film is flat out mediocre so that doesn't matter, the characters are really generic despite the actors themselves trying hard, and the pacing is really uneven despite being only an hour and a half longer.

It's a shame because there are some good things that came out of it. The CGI is ok and is accurately detailed on the design of Woody and the voice actor Eric Bauza did a good job imitating the actual character. Also the music score is pleasant and the scenery is very pretty.

Is Woody Woodpecker as terrible as the critics and audiences made it out to be? Nope, I wouldn't go too far to say I hated it, it sadly, its still not a good film. My recommendation: just watch the cartoon and give this one a skip unless you have kids. Otherwise, I'd stick to Speed Racer (2008).