Keeps hitting walls

Rating: 7/10 (19 June 2016)

The film is very funny, and there is wonderful creativity and imagination at play here. But these movies, all movies, are about the building of momentum, and Finding Dory can't seem to link it's set pieces effectively. It reaches a jog but keeps stumbling. You clench in your seat, you want it to keep moving. I can't believe 3000 people can work on a movie but no one sat the director down and told him there are too many slow, stirring scenes with piano twinkling in the background where characters convince Dory that she is special. There are at least four and every time they murder whatever rhythm the film had going. They tread on the groove. They are dull, superfluous. This message is built into the plot, we feel it, we don't need to be told it. There needs to be only one of these scenes, and it needs to come before the climax. The climax has THREE. Heck I was antsy, god knows what the 3 year old's will be doing.
Like I said, the movie is very funny, it almost feels like it was written for adults. The jokes are for the internet generation. They feel like memes. When a truck flies off a cliff in slow motion spilling fish everywhere and a salmon slaps two sea lions to the tune of "What a wonderful world" the movie becomes absurdist. I felt like I was watching a video that would crop up on my Facebook feed, edited by a stoner. Frankly the jokes might be a touch too strange, they undermine the reality of this world. They are funny but phony. Too meta. Perhaps they belong in a different film.
Look, the point is you will enjoy this film. It's thoroughly enjoyable. But I just don't think there is enough adventure here to have kids coming back, and kids are really the only ones who come back.