Robinson Crusoe (2016) – Review

 

It’s easy to please your humble reviewer. Any movie featuring cute animals gets immediate brownie points. Any movie featuring cute animals that get offed for no rhyme or reason (e.g. stupid spooks that always kill family pets before moving on to humans) gets an immediate thumbs down. Robinson Crusoe: The Wild Life has cute animals in spades, none of which die inexplicably, yet can’t be recommended in good faith to anyone over seven years of age. A plot as formulaic and uninspired as they come, on top of an oversaturation in the anthropomorphic animal genre, dooms this movie to an asinine mediocrity that even its adorable animated cast can’t save.

Daniel Defoe’s desert island classic has been adapted countless times since its publication nearly three hundred years ago, and this Belgian-French production does try to shake things up a bit by, well, adding cute animals into the equation. Crusoe still gets shipwrecked on a minute tropical isle, but instead of a politically incorrect native assistant named Friday, he gets an avian friend in the macaw Tuesday instead. It’s not entirely inconceivable for macaws to live on tropical islands, but what are the odds that he’s accompanied by only a single tapir, kingfisher, pangolin, hedgehog, chameleon and er… old goat? That’s the kind of leap of logic you’ll have to make if you want to take Robinson Crusoe’s basic premise at face value. Man and animal must then work together to protect their island home from the incursion of two nasty cats and their brood, who want to eat everything in sight.

And that’s basically it. Crusoe, Tuesday and implausibly diverse menagerie have assorted capers involving abovementioned savage felines, but it’s difficult to care about what the characters are doing when you’re constantly distracted by puzzling inconsistencies in the movie’s internal logic. On one hand, the animals live naturalistically in nests and burrows. On the other, the chameleon can turn invisible and Tuesday can mimic not only human speech, but also individual human voices. It’s as if Robinson Crusoe decided to pick gimmicks from a dozen other talking animal movies at random and just mix them together without any consideration for cogency.

Perhaps we’ve been spoiled by Pixar and DreamWorks, but there is now a certain richness of dimension that even generic cute animals in animated movies are expected to possess. Robinson Crusoe has none of that. The animals are well-drawn with expressive faces and body language, but are practically indistinguishable from each other apart from their obvious physical differences. Even Crusoe himself seems rather bland and generic. The only characters that will inspire a feeling other than tepid indifference are the feline villains, who are unflinchingly malevolent to a degree that will cause outrage to cat-lovers everywhere (one of them goes so far as to contrive at first-degree murder). Cardboard, stock characterisation does the movie no favours when its plot is already so thin, Crusoe’s harrowing quest for survival diluted by tropical luaus and large, empty, action set-pieces.

About the only good thing that can be said about Robinson Crusoe is that the animals are cute. In movie-reviewing parlance, that means the film’s visuals are lush and colourful, with animals that actually look like their real-life counterparts. The movie’s utilisation of physics and space in its set-pieces is also commendable, spanning the entire height and width of Tuesday’s island home. It’s a genuine pity that these bright spots couldn’t have been combined with a less formulaic plot or some actual dramatic tension. The uninspired dialogue may be a result of nuances getting lost in translation (the movie was originally voiced in German and French), but a good story is universal. That is precisely what this film lacks, for all its technical wizardry and pretensions of literary heritage.

Summary: About as interesting as a cute animal that does nothing but sit there looking cute. Lacks personality and originality.

RATING: 2 out of 5 stars

– Leslie Wong