Hilarious

Rating: 8/10 (25 November 2012)

Have you ever felt like you were stuck in a role you never wanted to play? Constantly subjected to scorn and ridicule simply for performing the only task available to you? What if you could change that?
Fix-it Felix Jr. has been a popular game in Litvak's for years. The hero and titular character, Felix (voiced by Jack McBrayer) has a magic hammer that can repair any damage done by the game's villain, Ralph. When the game is over, Felix is given a medal while Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly) is tossed off the roof by the tenants of the building he failed to destroy. When the arcade closes and the game is turned off, Ralph returns to his home atop a garbage heap in the nearby dump. For recreation, he visits Tapper's, a vintage game that assigns the player the role of a bartender. Also, upon our introduction to the story, Ralph makes his first visit to a support group for video game villains. Among the villains in attendance at Bad-Anon, we see M. Bison and Zangief from Street Fighter (voiced by Gerald C. Rivers and director Rich Moore respectively), a ghost from Pac-Man (voiced by Kevin Deters), and a zombie (Raymond Persi). During that meeting, he announces he no longer wants to be a bad guy. With the 30th anniversary of Fix-it Felix Jr., the tenants throw a party and "forget" to invite Ralph. Ralph crashes the party, in every sense of the word, and leaves soon after. Before he's left, he vows to return with a medal, something denied him by Felix and the tenants of the building he destroys. He seizes the opportunity to travel to a new game, a first-person shooter game called Hero's Duty, when a character from that game passes out in the bathroom. While at the center of Hero's Duty, Ralph is overwhelmed by the violence in modern games and refuses to heed the orders of his superior, Sergeant Calhoun (voiced by Jane Lynch). Once the arcade closes and the game ends, Ralph decides to forgo the usual hurdles of Hero's Duty and steal the medal typically awarded to the winner. After stealing the medal and, unwittingly, bringing a menacing enemy insect known as a Cy-bug with him, Ralph heads to the kart-racing game Sugar Rush. It's there that he encounters the perpetually glitchy and terminally annoying Vanellope von Schweetz (voiced by Sarah Silverman). Despite the initial friction, Ralph and Vanellope (Silverman) bond over their shared status as outcasts.
There is, of course, more to the story including Felix's pursuit of Ralph into the various other games and his budding romance with the no-nonsense Sergeant Calhoun, the true origin of Silverman's character, and an eventual revolt in the world of Sugar Rush. All of it, and I do mean all of it, had me riveted. I will say that, as a fan of old-style video games, I would've preferred seeing the character of Ralph travel to more than just the two different games besides his. Regardless of my criticisms, Wreck-It Ralph is hilariously entertaining and fun for viewers of all ages. Check it out.