Ratchet & Clank movie review & film summary (2016)
The movie's attitude is commendable. It's actually trying to have fun with material that should be fun, and it's also actively making fun of the pieces that are worthy of mockery. It's as innocent in its approach to all of this as a movie that features the destruction of several planets can be, too.
The effort is often obvious, and that means a good number of the jokes are funnier on a theoretical level than they are on a practical one. That's one issue. The other major one is that the humor only goes so far. At some point, the movie has to rely on the things at which it previously poked fun.
Our improbable hero is Ratchet (voiced by James Arnold Taylor), one of the last of his species—a Lombax, which looks mostly like a cat. He works as a mechanic in a desert valley of a planet called Veldin. The movie's bold color palette is striking, and it possesses an admirable level of detail in creating a series of disparate worlds—from the villain's stark headquarters on a mountainous planet to a bustling metropolis that serves as the backdrop for the movie's first action sequence.
Ratchet dreams of one day becoming a member of the Galactic Rangers, an elite quartet of warriors, led by the egotistically dunderheaded Captain Qwark (voice of Jim Ward), who defend the galaxy from evil. After a disastrous joyride in a souped-up flying car, Ratchet's boss/adoptive father Grim (voice of John Goodman), a purplish blob of a creature with dangling ears and tusks, warns the Lombax that he needs to lower his expectations for what he can get out of life.
The villain of the tale is Drek (voice of Paul Giamatti), an industry titan with a pear-shaped head and flattop haircut who rides around on a hovering cart. His plan is to annihilate a series of planets, take the best sections of the ruins, and piece them together into the utopia of his dreams. In the meantime, he has to worry about the fact that his henchmen are more concerned with their cellphones than they are with his orders.
Drek's right-hand robot is Victor Von Ion (voice of Sylvester Stallone), who longs to see real battle, and his mad-scientist partner-in-crime is Dr. Nefarious (voice of Armin Shimerman), who sees himself as more "vengeful" than "mad." Ratchet's eventual, pintsized sidekick Clank (voice of David Kaye) is a defective model in Drek's army of robots. The cute little guy with a matter-of-fact way with words and statistical probabilities of failure escapes the assembly line. Clank makes an emergency landing on Veldin, where Ratchet learns of Drek's evil plan and is determined to stop the bad guy—hoping to become a member of the Galactic Rangers in the process.
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