Wrecked by selfish and unlikeable characters.

Rating: 5/10 (7 February 2013)

My main issue with Wreck-It Ralph was how selfish and horrid the characters were, from the heartless and small-minded 'Nicelanders' to the bratty, irritating Vanellope. I spent the whole movie getting more and more exasperated at their actions and behaviour, from Calhoun constantly belittling Felix, to Vanellope stealing Ralph's medal and using it for herself, to the kid racers mocking her 'glitches' and destroying her car. There is such a thread of inherent nastiness to them that it's hard to accept the typically Disney-esque redemptive finale with any genuine empathy, after spending so much of the movie treating each other like dirt, the 'heroic' heart-warming moments that suddenly appear in the last half hour just seem out of character.
Can I also make the point here that I haven't even needed to mention any of the nefarious deeds perpetrated by the actual villain of the movie yet, because there's so much douchebaggery on show from the rest of them.
Some of the themes explored were quite serious, such as the ostracism of Ralph and Vanellope by their peers, in her case due to a 'glitch' condition that threw up some parallels with disability. Ralph is treated appallingly from the outset, his quest for acceptance triggered by an obnoxious secondary character called Jean, who later is laughably granted the moral high ground by the writers when Ralph returns with the medal he was told he would never get. In this scene, Jean's cold and calculated put-downs must have been intended to come across as sobering, but after using this character to instigate Ralph's at-times reckless and desperate journey, allowing him to castigate him further is particularly cruel and unjust.
Vanellope's character is a little different, in that she doesn't really have redeeming features at all, but you feel obliged to root for her because she is an outcast 'glitch', treated within her game/prison, 'Sugar Rush', like an extraneous anomaly. The emotive impact of her condition is milked for a bit, but with time and practice it proves to be a useful tool that she retains even after the happy ending, which means the parallels with genuine disability end particularly abruptly. Her cocky, bullish demeanour also grated with me, for example when she reacted with blind rage at Ralph when he tried to explain how she would endanger herself by driving meant that when he destroyed her car I had far less sympathy than I'm sure I was supposed to.
On a more positive note, the game references and art direction were superb; and the choice of an arcade was basically the only way this movie could work, despite it seeming a bit unrealistic to have something like Hero's Duty there, notwithstanding modern kids voluntarily spending their money on 30-year-old arcade games. The cynic in me feels that, like Cars, interesting issues were only explored half-heartedly in a film that ultimately targeted things children like - video games and candy in this case. There are moments of genuine humour, and despite the plot for the most part falling well short of what I hoped for there were a few neat twists that kept me interested, primarily involving Vanellope's picture on the outside of the machine, and the reveal of Turbo masquerading as the Candy King.
In closing, this film provided yet more evidence to me that it reflects how Americans are both the loveliest and the nastiest of people in equal measure. So many US shows rely on one-upmanship and bitchiness at the expense of other people for their laughs, but then overly sentimentalise other aspects of life to a degree that can seem absurd. The characters were so horrible in Wreck-It Ralph, but then spontaneously joined together in glorious harmony and celebration at the end, without any apparent learning curve or development to justify the transformation other than the fact that the nastiest and most selfish amongst them finally got his just desserts.