Ratchet & Clank was a series of action plat-former games made in the early 2000s by gaming company, Insomnia, which centred around Ratchet, an alien creature called a Lombax, and Clank, a tiny sentient robot, travelling the universe and stopping baddies in the most over-the-top way possible with wacky side-characters, colorful and wild environments, and delightfully extreme and insane weapons. It was colorful, it had weapons in a good creative variety, it had likeable characters, it was goofy, it was action-packed, and it spanned a ton of sequels, and while it has gone up and down in terms of public and critical reception over the years, its long lifespan proved it was a franchise that people were willing to stick with. This popularity was enough that they decided to create a reboot game in 2016 by the same name, which came with film following the exact same plot and even visual style as a means of hyping up the return of a long untouched franchise and bringing attention to their new release. However, the movie failed to please both hard-core fans and newcomers alike, tanked at the box office (only earning $14.4 million against an already messily $20 million budget) and was so badly received, that Gramercy Pictures (a production label known for distributing films for PolyGram Filmed Entertainment and Universal Pictures), quietly discontinued shortly after, which is pretty embarrassing considering it was their first (and now only) animated film. On the planet of Veldin, a young Lombax mechanic named Ratchet (voiced by James Arnold Taylor) dreams of becoming a hero like his ideal, Captain Qwark (voiced by Jim Ward), but is deemed unfit to be a ranger when he goes to try-outs. Ratchet finds his chance to become a hero when a ship crash lands near his home containing a defective war robot named Clank (voiced by David Kaye) who brings a warning that Chairmen Drek (voiced by Paul Giamatti) has created a weapon capable of destroying planets in the hopes of crafting a perfect one for himself. Literally thrown into the fray, Ratchet and Clank must work with elite combatants and a jealous Qwark in order to save the world from Drek. Despite coming from a property that had years of experience and even featured a lot of the same voice talent, the movie is a bland forgettable romp with very little to appease oldies or newbies. While being visually pleasing and containing some good actors, the film’s story, characters, writing, and pacing fails in providing anything entertaining, resulting in everything being either predictable or juvenile in its delivery. It fails to reintroduce a franchise that appealed to many with its colorful designs, witty writing, and awesome and creative actions and present a bland and unimpressive film as a trade-off.

Taking a video game and condensing it down into the length of a feature film can be trickier than you’d expect, as various attributes involved with gaming are removed when they become a film and components like lack of interaction and smaller running time and content are factors that need to be worked out. With that said, the first Ratchet & Clank game released in 2002 had a fairly straightforward plot to follow and this film takes the essential basics of the idea of two characters from different worlds joining together to take down a greedy overlord hoping to destroy planets for his own means, but its dumbed down to a far more simplistic area. The game had a road-trip mentality to it as visiting and exploring this locations helped create a unique and colorful personality for the franchise, whereas this feels very stereotypical ”kids’ film” in nature with various familiar cliches and outcomes. The film was directed by Kevin Munroe (while an uncredited Jericca Cleland co-directed), who had previously directed the equally unimpressive 2007 CG animated TMNT film, which also struggled with connecting with its target audience through its poor handling of its story, but while that film at least tried to spice up a long-lasting franchise, this film actually does less than what its originator did. Everything is rehashed, nothing is surprising or new, and it’s delivered in such a bland and unoriginal manner that it doesn’t even feel like it came from a pre-existing property, but rather a new IP that is starting off on a horrible note. The screenplay for this movie written by Munroe, Gerry Swallow and T. J. Fixman (who was a former Insomniac senior writer who helped write the Ratchet & Clank trilogy), contains all the expected cliches of this type of story, yet dilutes its own brand by squashing together elements from several of the entries in the franchise to the point that it starts to feel scrambled and more like forced in fan-service rather than intelligent planning. While the villain’s plan of reconstructing blown-up planets to create his own is a goofy fun idea, everything else involving the main characters and their own problems is insanely predictable and very tiring.

One of the weaknesses of this dulled-down plot that adds in new characters and concludes in a different way leads to a huge problem that sullies one of the main components of this film, the relationship between Ratchet & Clank. Despite being the literal name of the titular franchise, the two aren’t given much time on-screen together to bond as close as they do in their games. This movie inclusions of several more side characters limits the time spent between the two of them (as they were the only real characters of focus in the first game) and it doesn’t help that all of these characters (both new and old) and very obvious archetypes. The audience knows from the second they are shown on-screen what they are like and what is going to happen to them, with no interesting developments changing that predetermined fate. The older characters aren’t shown in an interesting new light to shine some new options onto older ideas, and the new characters have very little personality to feel like fresh introductions to this world. It’s hard to pretend like the characters from the games were incredibly memorable, but they had fun quirky designs, voices and personalities that brought their world to life, whereas these portrayals feel incredibly lifeless, hollow, and stale. One of the plus sides is that even though the characters might not be anything special, the voice acting in the film is decent solid. Both James Arnold Taylor and David Kaye as Ratchet and Clank clearly have chemistry, but they aren’t given enough time to make it feel genuine, but rather like their connection was built outside of this universe and whatever emotional connection does exist is a bleed-over from somewhere else. Characters like Captain Qwark and the evil chief scientist Dr. Nefarious (voiced by Armin Shimerman) have great designs and do go down a fun direction in their respective games, but in this universe, they are very one-note despite the actors still clearly trying. Chairman Drek is a pretty one-note bad guy, but Paul Giamatti is a bit humorous in his delivery, and most of the secondary characters give passable performances thanks to housing some pretty notable names like John Goodman, Rosario Dawson, and Sylvester Stallone.

The art style for the movie is full of color and shine, feeling very much like a video game, yet still given a cartoony flair that matches the franchise’s tone and creativity. Kevin Munroe also worked as a storyboard artist on the popular Nickelodeon cartoon, Hey Arnold!, a lead artist on the 2003 video game, Freaky Flyers, and was a concept artist on the 2006 CG animated film, The Ant Bully, so he’s definitely experience enough in the realms of cartoonish properties that feature unique designs for its characters. Many of the designs in the games were simple but contains a lot of unique flourishes and had a lot of personality, and while the new designs are pretty bland next to them, they do still match the style of the franchise. However, as bright, colorful, and expressive the animation is, it doesn’t fully incorporate the action very well. Ratchet & Clank had very overly extreme and wacky weapons that were fired in very extreme ways, leading to a heavy use of gunplay and the games combined that with the gameplay to create a fun run-and-gun style of play. Despite being very platform-like with slow back and forth running, the environments, set-ups and extreme weapons were interesting enough to grab the players attention and help give the games their own unique brand of gun gameplay that was more creative than gruesome, and fast and flowing. In comparison, the film’s animation is much slower and feels much more focused on looking pretty rather than involving chaotic fight scenes. The action set pieces aren’t that good, as they are either typical shoot outs that have been done in any other sci-fi story, or just done way too slow to really get that into. Despite some of the gadgets capturing that needed wacky element, they aren’t used in a memorable way. The film also houses a lot of lame humor that’s either too mainstream or too predictable to be funny, with a lot of moments that just end on an awkward note despite how many jokes they are trying to throw at you. Every once and a while a joke will work, particularly one involving a funeral for the robotic henchman of Chairmen Drek or a certain sassy autopilot on a spaceship, but other than that, it doesn’t hold strong.

Despite the reboot for the game being praised and accepted by the masses, it did also receive some push back for being a little bland and nowhere near as personable and sparky as its original counterpart, which is exactly what this movie is down to the smallest bolt. It can satisfy young children with bright colors and bouncy visuals, but it can’t tap into nostalgia-driven fans or interest fresh eyes. Though it has a good cast, and it does have a very nice visual style, its weakness in plot, character development, humor and being unable to create a strong connection between the titular characters, Ratchet & Clank doesn’t live up to the standards that the games have set-up for many years. Though the franchise had mainly ran smoothly these previous years, this film is the stray loose gear that messes it up.

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