Decent

Rating: 7/10 (3 July 2010)

Toy Story 2 saw cowboy doll Woody (Tom Hanks) realize his kid owner Andy (John Morris) would grow up someday. In Toy Story 3 he has: he's 17, he's headed for college, and he put his toys away long ago. After years of neglect, nearly being crushed in a garbage truck is the last straw. Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Mr. Potatohead (Don Rickles), Slinky Dog (Blake Cark, replacing the late Jim Varney), and the rest of the family hop in a donation box headed for Sunnyside Day Care, a paradise on the outside and a death trap filled with rampaging, abusive toddlers on the inside.
Pixar Animation Studios has never made a bad movie and their eleventh feature doesn't break tradition. Simply decent films like Cars and A Bug's Life have been known to surface, though, and Toy Story 3 ranks among them. Screenwriter Michael Arndt has nothing new to say, simply stitching together story and themes ripped from the first two. The toys have to escape a hostile environment to return to Andy (as in the original), and they must grapple with their feelings of abandonment (as in the sequel). Neither concept was a big focus in the movies they came from, so all Arndt has done is elaborate on places we've been before. His script doesn't become inspired until halfway through, when it turns into a prison break picture. Halfway through is too long a wait.
But once Toy Story 3 gets going, it gets good. The action delivers genuine thrills, with an elaborate escape plan and a perilous encounter in a landfill. The humor, all too sparse in the beginning, creates gags like Buzz in Spanish mode and Potatohead as a tortilla. Whether this marketing dream come true is actually finished remains to be seen, but the heartfelt ending couldn't possibly be topped for emotion and meaning.
Toy Story 3 leaves little doubt of its inferiority to its predecessors with an unoriginal story and a bad first half. Once the remaining scenes pick up, though, the movie becomes decent. That's a disappointment in the company of other Pixar works, but this one has moments of brilliance to show that decent isn't so bad after all.