Review: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Patreon)

I started howling when I realized that Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl was Aardman's remake of Cape Fear, and I pretty much never stopped laughing.

Reviewing a new Wallace & Gromit movie almost seems unfair. I grew up on these guys; I'm going to have fun watching them unless Aardman puts them in the sterile hands of AI or gives them to whoever animated the 2018 version of Watership Down. Wallace and Gromit are almost inherently lovable; Aardman would have to actively try to fail in order to make a bad Wallace & Gromit movie.

Vengeance Most Fowl isn't completely free of problems. Most of us are tired of legacy sequels, and I'm not seeing a completely convincing reason to bring back Feathers McGraw, aside from him being the greatest villain in film history. Ending the movie with him back on the loose is a tedious bit of sequel bait that slightly undermined my enjoyment of the preceding hour and 15-odd minutes. Marvelization is creeping into everything these days, but seeing it surface in Wallace & Gromit is a little depressing.

That said, it's Wallace & Fucking Gromit. This was a riot. The animation is pretty much Aardman's best — I gasped at some of the things this movie did with motion in the first few minutes. Wallace's reliance on AI destroying half the town is a nice contemporary touch (I remarked to Janet that Wallace would absolutely be an Elon Musk fan). The comedy is as good as ever — Feathers McGraw with the seal is a riot, as is Wallace's petting machine. Regardless of whether this movie happened, I'm glad it did. Thanks for the Christmas present, Aardman.