Review: Sneaks has sole, but no soul! I hate myself for typing that.

Let's get this out of the way: Sneaks is a deeply dumb, extremely ugly movie. It just is. If you ever saw the trailer for it, this probably isn't a surprise. This is like a throwaway 30 Rock joke in feature form, the sort of thing Tracy would've booked to Jenna's chagrin. It's a nearly joyless affair. And that happens sometimes. Not every movie can be a winner. Not every movie can have redeeming features. This one arguably has a few, but they're so few and far between that I could never argue they're worth sifting through the junk for. 

And then there's the question that isn't so much about the movie's quality, but rather its conception: who is this movie intended for? Obviously, there's a huge community of people who are intensely passionate about shoes. The movie calls them sneakerheads. I don't know if that's a real term. I don't care enough to take a few seconds to Google it right now. But I would imagine those people are largely adults, maybe with disposable income to fuel what can be a very pricey hobby. So they might not be lining up to watch this. And kids probably want something more interesting than talking shoes. But I'm not a kid, so what do I know?

In ways, this feels like the final straw that could break the camel's back of anthropomorphizing objects. Or it would be, if this movie was going to register in the culture or at the box office in any meaningful way. But it isn't going to. Toy Story opened the floodgates of giving textured emotional interiority to things that never had been thought of or depicted that way. Pixar became masters of it, giving rich emotional lives to bugs (A Bug's Life), fish (Finding Nemo), cars (Cars), redheads (Brave), and even emotions themselves (Inside Out). Illumination got a big hit in the same vein, but with lesser artistic verve, with The Secret Life of Pets. Now, we're learning about the thoughts and feelings of shoes.

Baseline, I think it's a bad idea. But it's not the worst idea. At least, I don't think it is. Close, maybe. But it's something.

But watching this movie, I kept thinking like...man, this is fucked. All those other categories work because they're things that exist largely separately from us (well maybe not redheads....they walk among us). I guess cars are also an exception, because they're used so often, but the Cars universe has no humans in it, so I think the point still stands. But shoes are on us. We're wearing them. Using them every day. So for them to be alive is creepy and weird! It doesn't really work! When we're introduced to our main characters, a fancy pair of sneakers named Ty and Max, I was like, okay, sure, all pairs of shoes are boy-girl. But then another pair we meet later are both boys. And then I'm spiraling, like, what determines a shoe's gender? Do shoes have sex to reproduce? There's a(n admittedly funny) exchange between a couple shoes about one of the shoe's mothers. Shoes have mothers?? What is happening in this world?

It just doesn't work on a fundamental level. And that's before we even get into the hackneyed plotting, where characters just always manage to find the other characters they're looking for with ease. And the bizarre inconsistencies in how smart characters are. Early in the film, Ty reveals that he doesn't know what basketball is. Later in the movie, he mentions Sidney Poitier. Huh?? Make it make sense!

There are so many other weird and off-putting things in this. Maybe I can dish them out rapid fire rather than dwelling. There's a weird amount of product placement. Nike, Converse, Gatorade, sure sure. But also Spotify. Ruffles? Okay. The human characters in this movie are so ugly. The main kid, a high schooler, has a nasty patch of facial hair. The animation has this clippy-skippy style that helps make up for how weird the designs are, but they're still unpleasant to look at. The shoes are so bland-looking, which is especially strange when they're in close-ups. The original music is trash, which is a bummer because I'm always ready to add a new song to my running playlist. The shoes' main foe in the streets are rats, which is random but like...yeah, there are rats in NYC. And the rats are genuinely terrifying. And we see some of their corpses. These shoes straight-up murder rats! Insane movie!

But let's focus on some positives. The voice cast didn't do much for me, but Martin Lawrence delivers great work as J.B., the street-smart sneaker who helps Ty on his quest. He manages to lace (lol) his performance with the appropriate roughness and edge, but also a healthy dose of tenderness. He's the definite standout, but I also liked Laurence Fishburne and Keith David's performances.

I mentioned how much I disliked looking at the human characters, but there's a notable exception: The Forger, who's sort of the villain behind the villain, and looks like a giant sneaker combined with the machine the eye doctor uses to determine your prescription. It's an insane design, but very cool and slightly voodoo-adjacent? I dug it whenever he was on screen.

There are a few funny shoe-specific jokes/puns, like the revelation that a child's shoe who's part of the movie's Greek chorus is actually 35 years old.

That's about all I've got, and all the brain power I want to put into thinking about this movie. Never again!