Retro-cool points for sure, but needed more laughs and more heart

Rating: Null/10 (17 February 2013)

"It's the new Pixar film" I said to my partner, as we sat to watch this film recently, although it didn't take me long to realize that while Disney may own Pixar now, this isn't to say that they can suddenly produce films that have made that studio so very successful. Wreck-It Ralph has the high-concept idea and shades of Toy Story in its "alive when the lights go out" motif, but it is disappointingly light in most things after this has settled in. The plot sees a villain in a video game setting out to be a good guy in other games so that he can return home with a prize to prove it and thus be accepted by his fellow characters.
On the face of it the film has the potential to be emotional, moving and funny and you can see that it is aiming for the Pixar mould, but it just gets lost in its own plotting and forgets to do the key things well. There is a lot going on here – villains, glitches, a quest for a medal, a quest for a race, a quest to get Ralph back etc etc. All of the plotting takes time and offers little in return. The key thing for me though is that it simply isn't funny or fun enough; it has a few chuckles but nothing more than that. The characters and the jokes are pretty obvious – even the casting is easy to predict (for example the big joke around Sarah Silverman and McBrayer is that they are the characters we already know them to be in adult world). It is an adventure and will distract kids, but the laughs are too far between. The cool points are there from the start though – the 8-bit graphics, the gamer in-jokes and references, but they mostly aren't clever so much as just done and this gets old quite quickly. It is a film badly in need of genuine heart and warmth but this never comes either; we get sentimentality and moments like this but nothing real or actually moving.
This is across the story, across the characters and across the jokes. It still gets cool points and it still has its moments but it is disappointingly lacking in wit and heart, leaving a lot of noise and adventure but nothing more than that. Worth a look but it doesn't even get close to the Pixar films that represent the high water mark to which it clearly aspires.