Ratatouille Disappoints

Rating: 6/10 (17 July 2007)

Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 1 and 2.
And now, Ratatouille. Considering that this movie came from Pixar, it was so earth shatteringly average that it made me want to cry.
Remy (Patton Oswalt, King of Queens) is a rat with a love for cooking. It's his passion in life. Often choosing cooking over family. His dad (Brian Dennehy) and the rest of the rat colony, all think Remy needs to stop chasing a dream that will never come true. It's time wasted.
After messing around in a local woman's kitchen, Remy gets busted and chased out of the house with a shotgun. Everyone else, in fear, heads for their little boats to float away in the sewer. Remy gets separated from his family, certain that he'll never see his family again. Hungry and alone, all Remy has is the book, Anyone Can Cook, of his all time favorite chef, Gusteau.
In his delusional state, Remy receives advice from a shoulder angel version of the recently deceased Chef Gusteau and ends out making all the way to Gusteau's old restaurant in Paris.
Remy befriends Linguini. A young garbage boy who is credited with making a delicious soup that was actually Remy's. Because Remy would never get a chance to cook, he and Linguini enter into a partnership, where Remy does the cooking through Linguini, and Linguini gets the credit.
As the movie wears on, the two run into several problems. They find it difficult to keep this secret from the overly mean head chef, Skinner, a growing tension between the two begins when Linguini falls in love with another chef, and they are faced with the challenge of cooking something for the most respected and hard to please critic in France...Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole)
Critics have raved this movie as the best film Pixar has ever made. Uh...no. This is probably their worst film ever made. Pixar has always churned out great family movies, and I've always adored the characters they create. No...not this time.
None of the characters are terribly likable, and the laughs are very few, despite repeated attempts with gags about French people.
It was OK. Nothing more, nothing less. It's original, as most Pixar stuff is, and so that helps it along, but it just wasn't that good compared to their other work. It was a semi-entertaining, unfunny family film.
A generous 6/10