A Very Fishy Cash-Grab

Rating: 4/10 (23 July 2019)

Man, this is a pretty dark decade for Pixar. Brave and Cars 2 were really disastrous overall, and this is yet another disappointment from the formerly great studio. The plot is serviceable, but relatively mindless. Dory suddenly remembers her parents, so she, Marlin, and Nemo go to look for them. It's pretty vapid, though, with tons of obnoxious new characters, and only the occasional flashback to Dory as an infant providing any sort of emotion. Additionally, the entire final act is a tiresome series of characters getting captured and/or put into dangerous situations over and over and over, and the scenarios get increasingly ridiculous until we end up with a seven-tentacled octopus driving a truck full of fish off of a cliff and into the sea. The humans are all pretty dull, from the oblivious workers at the aquarium to the dimwitted guests who seem to think that the octopus is actually a human baby for a minute. Finally, there was some discussion about how two characters who appeared to be mentally disabled were treated like garbage and played for laughs. While I'm not usually looking for stuff to be offended about in films, this was kind of a shocking inclusion for the company, and shows that they've become pretty unscrupulous and lazy. Overall, this is just a fishy cash-grab that has no real reason to exist. Ellen DeGeneres' Dory is a character who gets old quickly, so let's hope there aren't any more "Finding Fish" films in the works at Pixar.