Too adult for kids, to smug for adults, and not even close to Roald Dahl

Rating: 4/10 (7 July 2019)

I wanted to like this film. I love animation, whether its the flashiest CGI or the simplest stop-motion, and I love Roald Dahl. I like witty, quirky unexpected humour and I don't get into a spin when a book adaptation does just that - adapts a story for the screen. The cast list looked terrific. What could I lose?
First I lost hope; then I lost interest. The trouble with this film was that it was trying to be a witty and stylish adult heist-film within a child's storybook - but there was never enough sense of threat to make that work. But they didn't stop there: a touch of spagetti-western with the showdown with a texan rat actually got me interested for the whole 3 minutes before they dropped back to the boring main threads. They squidged in a disaffected teen buddy story, with the jealous, overlooked son and his perfect cousin - unconvincing, tiresome, solved by the son suddenly becoming athletic and brilliant under fire for no reason. They made a stab at a dash or romance Mrs Fox the fiesty wife who lets him away with it anyway. Couldn't find enough clichÃ©s?
The Americanisation of the story wouldn't bother me at all if it was complete and wholehearted instead of half-baked. Why were the villains, in this rural American landscape, English? Why did Jarvis Cocker turn up singing bluegrass? Why did the helicopter spotter Australian? These things are so absurd they almost sound funny, but in the event they just seemed stupid and unconvincing.
The adult humour came over as smug and self-indulgent - very different from Dahl's odd, daring and absurd charm. "Based on" is overstating it - they kept the 3 villains, a rat and Mr/Mrs Fox: most other things were changed. The one element from Dahl's story, which was published 1970, that they did not change was the gender balance. Hard to imagine a wildlife community with a male/female ratio of 9:1 lasting. Oh, and the females were 1. the wife/mother and 2. the possible love interest for the cousin (so the son could be jealous). No, no hold on... a villain's wife appeared briefly twice...
I did like the animation - the strange layers, the funny digging scenes, the narrow and tall thing. But it didn't make up for a muddled plot, no likeable characters, a tiresomely smug script. No joy and no surprises.
This film was selected by my youngest kid but the kids watched it pretty well in silence and said it was... "Mmm. Okay" That says it all really. Disappointing.