Film reviews: CODA | The Bad Guys | Sonic the Hedgehog 2 | The Novice

It may have won Best Picture at the Oscars, but CODA is still a fairly shallow, predictable affair, writes Alistair Harkness
Emilia Jones in CODAEmilia Jones in CODA
Emilia Jones in CODA

CODA (12A) **

The Bad Guys (U) ****

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (PG) **

The Novice (15) ***

Amid the craziness of the recent Academy Awards, the surprise best picture win for CODA barely registered. It was a surprise mainly because this well-intentioned, feel-good drama about a child of deaf adults negotiating the trials of adolescence is a pretty rote affair compared to recent winners Moonlight, Nomadland and Parasite.

An emotionally manipulative remake of the 2015 French comedy La Famille Belier, the new version is set against the backdrop of a struggling fishing community and revolves around 17-year-old Ruby (Emilia Jones) as she starts to feel the burden of always always having to be an intermediary for her deaf parents and older brother as they try to earn enough from fishing to stay afloat financially (her parents are played by Marlee Martin and newly anointed Oscar-winner Troy Kotsur; her older brother by Daniel Durant).

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Ruby also loves singing, a source of potential conflict the film amps up when she joins the school choir and her inspirational teacher encourages her to apply to a prestigious music college. What follows is pretty much Billy Elliot with power ballads as Ruby’s love for something her family can’t enjoy threatens to drive a wedge between them. To the film’s credit, writer/director Sian Heder retains some of the original’s ribald humour by making Ruby’s randy parents as mortifying to her as possible. Alas, she also casts her net in some fairly shallow dramatic water, dragging us towards a predictably rousing finale that has all the emotional depth of a TV singing competition. Licorice Pizza was robbed.

Bad GuysBad Guys
Bad Guys

Like an animated-riff on Ocean’s Eleven, The Bad Guys has been conceived as a family friendly heist movie that smartly uses all the con artist tropes to deliver an amusing message about not judging books by their covers. Its simple-yet-amusing premise is to make its titular crew of criminals the sorts of anthropomorphised characters forever stigmatised as the villains in kids’ picture books.

Led by a big bad wolf named simply Mr Wolf (charmingly voiced by Sam Rockwell), they’re a squabbling band of misfits united by their status as social pariahs. Thus we have the tetchy, safe-cracking Snake (comedian Marc Maron); the tech-savvy Tarantula (Awkafina); the always-in-disguise Shark (Craig Robinson), and the loose-cannon Piranha (Anthony Ramos). The plot takes shape around their efforts to pull off the ultimate job, but it’s smart enough to have fun with that idea, deconstructing it in a way that’ll make sense to parents and kids alike as it delivers a fast-moving, nothing-is-what-it-seems plot about finding a way to be good in the world.

It’s certainly a better bet than Sonic the Hedgehog 2. This sequel to the hybrid live-action/animated adaptation of the Sega video game character picks up where the previous film left off, with the speedy blue hedgehog (voiced again by Ben Schwartz) causing mayhem as he fulfils his superhero fantasies while his adoptive dad (James Marsden) schools him on what true heroism is. Jim Carey is back too as evil inter-dimensional villain Dr Robotnik, a literal moustache twirler bent on revenge who arrives on earth in search of a magic green emerald that will bestow its owner with the power to physically manifest any thought. Frenetic action duly follows; so does boredom.

Set within an all-women’s competitive collegiate rowing programme, The Novice features a fine turn from up-and-coming actress Isabelle Fuhrman as Alex, a first year student with a monomaniacal determination to prove that hard work alone can trump simple talent. Joining the rowing team on a whim, she becomes obsessed with besting the other girls, a physical challenge that starts exacerbating some deep-rooted mental health issues. The end result is a little Black Swan, a little Whiplash, and though debut writer/director Lauren Hadaway finds stylish ways to immerse us in Alex’s subjective viewpoint, she loses track of the drama a little in the overblown finale.

CODA is streaming on AppleTV+; The Bad Guys, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and The Novice are on general release.

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