Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Turbo

This is topic Turbo in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=001981

Posted by Stu Jamieson (Member # 4626) on 09-28-2013, 12:18 AM:

Disney has had Cars, Cars 2 and their current release, Planes, and so it is that Dreamworks has responded with their auto-flavoured kidflick, Turbo.

Turbo follows a garden snail, Theo (but he prefers the moniker "Turbo"), who feels the need for speed but is hampered by the genetic make up of his species. That is until he gets sucked into the inlet manifold of a dragster, infused with NOX and spat out the tail pipe with new auto-flavoured super powers including a nitrous-injected shell. Alrighty then......... I suppose it's no more ridiculous than a teenager suffering a radioactive spider bite and then waking up with the abilities of an arachnid.

Aside from the notion that a snail can pass safely through the combustion chamber of a motor vehicle engine, the film offers little in the way of surprises. It's hard for the film to get any crazier than it's set up, so when Theo is entered into the Indy 500 by a taco salesman as a way to promote his family business, it seems a perfectly natural progression.

The film borrows heavily (and lovingly) from the stylistics of The Fast and the Furious and this adds a welcome dose of nostalgia to the older rev-head audience. Indeed the films tag line ("Better fast than furious.") explicitly welcomes this.

Thematically it's your stock standard movie about realising your dreams and not letting others hold you back and it affably achieves this goal. The characters are likeable, the adventures are wacky and funny, and there's just the right dose of sentimentality to get you emotionally invested in it.

Despite it's patently ridiculous story, Turbo is a lot of fun and will be enjoyed by children and adults alike.

(For the record, though, my 6yo preferred Smurfs 2.)

7 out of 10

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 09-28-2013, 01:07 AM:

The tagline on my Turbo one-sheet said "He's fast. They're furious."

Posted by Jonathan Goeldner (Member # 4854) on 09-28-2013, 10:20 PM:

I was surprised by this, I thought not only were the main characters interesting, but the human characters had charm.

I was a little annoyed with Bow Tie Reston, even though they claim all the auditoriums can playback in 7.1 - I didn't hear any rear surround from this or (more recently) 'Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters'

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 09-28-2013, 11:10 PM:

I thought the beginning was really good, but all of the fiddling around at the strip mall got boring. The end, on the other hand, was downright exciting.

So it scores two out of three for me.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 04-07-2014, 05:01 AM:

Sorry for bumping this, but I just got around to see this in the Original Version (as nobody dared to play the "non-dubbed" versions around here).

The semi-private show got somewhat ruined at first, because the KDM wasn't working (great work, Mr. Fox!). Someone managed to get a Blu-Ray from the store next door in a last-minute effort to save the show, so with a delay of about 45 minutes we had a movie rolling. The only thing that was Missing in Action was the 3D, but I could gladly live without that. Interestingly, a few people put their glasses back on during the show, their 3D experience must have been truly amazing [Wink]

.

The first part of the movie starts rather strong and is quite hilarious. Putting those human personalities into those little snakes really worked quite well.

The racing part of the movie, unfortunately, feels a bit too much like Cars(R) with Snails. Also, the whole concept of a snail racing real Indy cars feels a bit too outlandish. And yeah, I know there already talking snails in this movie... still, somebody couldn't have come up with a better concept for most of the second part of the movie?