Film reviews: Hoppers | Scream 7 | Dolly
Following a string of misfires, Pixar’s new film Hoppers shows that it can still make a sparky, original and properly entertaining movie, writes Alistair Harkness
Hoppers (PG) ★★★★
Scream 7 (18) ★★
Dolly (18) ★★
The billion-dollar-grossing Inside Out 2 aside, Pixar has been creatively adrift for a while, churning out conceptually confused allegories (Elemental, Seeing Red), misjudged spin-offs (Lightyear), and undemanding fluff (Elio, Luca). But if Pixar's boundary pushing instincts are in shorter supply these days — which is also why we’re getting a fifth Toy Story movie later this year — the studio’s new film Hoppers demonstrates that it can still make a sparky original movie that’s properly entertaining, even if it doesn’t scale the artistic heights of its best work.
Revolving around a teenage environmentalist called Mabel (Piper Curda) whose consciousness is zapped into the body of a robot beaver, it cheekily and openly borrows its high-concept plot from Avatar (“This is nothing like Avatar!” a character protests) and proceeds to have a lot of fun running with this idea, slyly expanding it into a family friendly film about not giving up hope, even when resistance seems futile.
That’s how things are starting to seem to college-aged activist Mabel, a rebel girl — cue Bikini Kill needle drop — whose efforts to stop the local mayor from building a highway through the glade she spent her childhood exploring with her beloved grandmother is failing to stir up much support.
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With 48 hours to go until the concrete starts being poured, she discovers her only option is to coax the beavers that have mysteriously disappeared from this hitherto protected oasis back to the glade, a quest that takes a weird turn when she accidentally stumbles upon her eccentric biology professor’s secret project to develop body-swapping technology that will make the field study of wildlife more effective. Hijacking the tech, the desperate Mabel embarks on a mission to rally the local wildlife by “hopping” into the body of a mechanical beaver and promptly realising that the many peculiarities and complexities of the animal world are going to make stopping the highway development a more difficult prospect than expected.
Partly deconstructing its own anthropomorphic tendencies with amusing gags about the hierarchies of the natural world, what follows is delightfully bonkers in a way that doesn’t bog the story down with convoluted plot mechanics. Instead it wears its conceptual flights of fancy lightly (“You put ‘this’, into ‘this’,” a character repeatedly explains of the Hoppers technology) and boasts lively voice work by, among others, Meryl Streep and Dave Franco as a royal butterfly and her megalomaniacal grub-of-a son, Bobby Mohnihan as a tolerance-promoting beaver king called George, and Jon Hamm as Mabel’s human nemesis Mayor Jerry, a slick political operator who might not be as soulless as he first appears.
For such a self-referential horror franchise, it’s ironic that Scream 7 declines to comment much on its own tired status as a nostalgia-courting legacy sequel timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the first film coming out. Of course, playing things a little straighter could be its own perverse way of subverting expectations, but a dull horror film is a dull horror film, however you slice and dice it. This instalment brings back Neve Campbell (who skipped the last one) and Courtney Cox (who didn’t), as well as original writer Kevin Williamson, who not only co-scripts, but also directs — albeit with none of the flair of the late Wes Craven, nor the playfulness of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the filmmaking duo behind the previous two franchise-reviving instalments.
Focusing on Campbell’s Sidney and her struggle to connect with her 17-year-old daughter Tatum (Isabel May), the film is scratching at something interesting in its attempt to show how Sidney’s position as the franchise’s indestructible heroine might be negatively impacting her daughter's self-esteem now that she’s the same age that Sidney was in the first film. But while it’s fun to see Campbell once again embracing her inner badass, the new teen characters are pretty thinly conceived and Williamson struggles to generate any genuine tension, blowing a potentially interesting twist regarding the identity of this instalment’s Ghostface killer with the inclusion of a perfunctory storyline involving AI and an anti-climactic final reveal.
There’s more horror in Dolly, a contemporary set, stylistically retro slasher film, artfully shot in 16mm to evoke the scuzzy aesthetics of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The eponymous villain — played by American wrestling star Max the Impaler — is a deranged killer given to wearing a porcelain doll’s head over her own head and either offing her victims with the sharp edge of a shovel or tormenting them by dressing them in doll’s clothing and babying them in her backwoods cabin. It’s a grim, freaky set up, but it lacks the sustained menace of its biggest influence and, unlike Ti West’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre-riffing X trilogy, doesn’t have enough ideas of its own to take it somewhere interesting. Fabianne Therese and Sean William Scott co-star.
Hoppers and Dolly are in cinemas from 6 March, Scream 7 is in cinemas now
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