WHAT’S IT ABOUT
When the meanest, nastiest villains pull a trick to take over their town, two brave children team up with a family of magical animals to bring them down.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
Allow me to be honest: Netflix released “The Twits” on October 17th, and I am left wondering who thought this needed to be made at all. This animated film, based on Roald Dahl’s 1980 children’s novel, is trying overwhelmingly hard to be revolting, and it misses the point of Dahl’s writing entirely. Director Phil Johnston, a co-creator of the ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ movies, takes a British short classic and morphs it into an eighty-five-minute disaster that nobody asked for. The basic information is as follows. Mr. and Mrs. Twit are two horrible married people who live in the surely awful town of Triperot, where all they do is trick each other, and they dream of opening Twitlandia, the world’s worst theme park, which includes rides made from old outhouses and bouncy pits filled with bug-ridden mattresses, along with slides that look like intestines. These two awful people are looking to cash in on making people sick, which is still probably better than spending the day at Six Flags during the hot summer months. Oh, hold on. The movie adds two orphaned kids, Beesha and Bubsy, because, apparently, the filmmakers thought there could never be enough sadness in a Dahl story. The children then find out that the Twits are keeping magical creatures called Muggle-Wumps locked up in their barn, and they are harvesting magic fluids from their tears to use as power to help them run their sleazy amusement park. Yep, you read that right. This entire evil scheme runs on crying monkey things. Currently, it has been branded as a major environmental narrative about alternative energy, while also sounding odd and torturous. The voice actors are quite good. Margo Martindale, for example, plays Mrs. Twit as if she were a psychotic Southern chef show host, while Johnny Vegas brings a somewhat maniacal energy to Mr. Twit that almost works. Natalie Portman and Emilia Clarke show up, too, along with Jason Mantzoukas as a mayor whose butt literally explodes on screen for about a full minute. I wish I was making that up. When your movie features Oscar-nominated actors and the best you can do is animated butt explosions, something went seriously wrong during production. In terms of things that go wrong, let’s take a second to discuss how the movie looks. The animation style seems to suggest trying to be intentionally ugly, rough around the edges, maybe with an allusion to a handmade stop-motion film. But it all looks cheap and unfinished. It looks like someone made it on an old computer from 2005. Everything has great big swatches of kind of brown and green that are often kind of disgusting, and you feel like you need a shower after watching. The Muggle Wumps are bright turquoise, and they look disgusting. Nothing visually fits together, and it feels like your eyes never get a break. But, and maybe this is worse than “The Twits” looking a little ugly, is that I don’t even think the movie knows what it wants to be. A gross-out comedy for kids who find farts funny? A political statement about how corrupt people could trick big, dumb people into supporting them? A sweet story about orphans who find a family? The script by Johnston and Meg Favreau tries to jam all these ideas together, and the result feels like watching three different movies fight each other for screen time. The humor relies almost entirely on bathroom jokes, boogers, worms, diarrhea, and every other disgusting thing the writers could think of. Now, I’m not saying kids don’t laugh at this stuff, because obviously they do. But when that’s literally all you’ve got, it gets old fast. The film even includes several songs with David Byrne, which sounds good, and would be fine in another film, but when you hear him, he is, in fact, inconsequential and unfinished. The characters sing about the joy of being free, and the lyrics do not correspond to the action in the story. What frustrates me is that this adaptation misunderstands Roald Dahl’s work completely. Yes, Dahl wrote mean-spirited stories featuring cruel adults and grossness. But he respected his young readers and did not patronize them. Dahl was cleverly wicked and had some genuine darkness that kids could handle, because he believed they were smart. The Twits, the film experience, treats its audience like they are too pre-cognitive to understand anything besides poop jokes and bright colors. It is such obvious pandering that it makes you question if anyone involved has had any exposure to being a child, or seen the kids simply as suckers for subpar entertainment. The orphan characters are the worst. Beesa and Bubsy are so underdeveloped and vacant that I literally googled their names as I wrote this. There is literally not one reason they are in the film aside from providing someone for the audience to root for, and that is all. Every scene with them drags because the movie suddenly shifts into this overly sweet, talking-down-to-toddlers mode that clashes with all the gross-out humor everywhere else. Then there’s this bizarre political subplot where the Twits run for mayor after flooding the town’s water with liquid hot dog meat. The movie wants to make some point about how terrible people can win elections by lying and promising to fix the economy, which feels weirdly heavy for a story that also features hairball gags and toad-licking. The tone jumps around so much that you get whiplash trying to follow it. By the time the movie limps to its ending and tries to teach lessons about empathy and truth, it’s way too late. You’ve already had over seventy minutes of nothing but gross, and now we care about the idea of love for everyone? As if throwing a scant amount of fruit on a massive mound of sugary cereal counts as healthy. The cheap mix of all the gross parts with hints of love for humanity rings hollow and contrived. I get it: not every movie needs to be a work of art. Children’s entertainment can be dumb and odd. But “The Twits” fails on just about every level. It is visually displeasing in a different way from interesting, striking a confused tonal amount in a way that isn’t creative, and derivative in a way that isn’t fun. Netflix bought the Roald Dahl Story Company in 2021, and if this is their vision for the property, we are in trouble. Wes Anderson made four beautiful Dahl adaptations for the same platform, proving it could be done right. This ain’t it. The saddest part is that somewhere buried in here, you can see hints of a better movie. Martindale and Vegas actually bring energy to their roles. The idea of criticizing how people vote for obviously terrible leaders has potential. However, all these elements are awash in muck, literally and figuratively. Children deserve more than this. Parents deserve more than sitting through this. Even the complicated Roald Dahl deserved better than to have his name affixed to such sloppiness and cynicism. “The Twits” isn’t just a bad children’s movie, but it’s a bad children’s movie to the extent that you almost enjoy the better children’s movies that much more. Don’t bother with this – see literally anything else with your family. You’ll thank me later.
OUR RATING – A MISERABLE 2