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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nWhen\nI first heard that I\u2019d be reviewing an animated movie called \u201cAbominable\u201d this\nweekend, I was excited. I couldn\u2019t wait to see a movie about a bovine that\nswallows an incendiary device. Sadly, this movie is about a yeti and not, as I\nhad hoped, a bomb in a bull. Between this movie, this year\u2019s \u201cMissing Link,\u201d\nand last year\u2019s \u201cSmallfoot,\u201d all the yeti and Sasquatch jokes in existence have been made, so the bull joke is all that\u2019s\nleft. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The\nyeti escapes from the clutches of greedy industrialist Burnish (Eddie Izzard)\nand makes fast friends with a girl named Yi (Chloe Bennet), who gives him the\nunimaginative name of Everest. Yi is a girl who secretly works multiple jobs\nand plays the violin. All she needs to do is secretly eat vegetables and she\u2019ll\nsecretly be the perfect child. She\u2019s squirrelling money away to go on a\nmulti-stop tour of China. How much do you want to bet that she\u2019ll go on that\ntrip without even realizing it throughout the course of this film? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Burnish and his top\nscientist Zara (Sarah Paulson) are trying to hunt down Everest, so Yi\nspontaneously makes the decision to return Everest to his namesake mountain.\nShe and Everest hop on a barge, prompting her impressionable young neighbor\nPeng (Albert Tsai) to hop aboard as well. Peng\u2019s older cousin Jin (Tenzing\nNorgay Trainor) is responsible for him, so he has to come along too. The\nunlikely trio navigate China trying to get their new friend home, bonding and\nlearning about themselves along the way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yi and Peng are exactly\nwhat you\u2019d expect from these types of characters. She\u2019s strong, smart, and\nresourceful (oh, and independent, can\u2019t forget independent), even under the\nemotional duress of having recently lost her father. He\u2019s loyal, fun-loving,\nand always getting into trouble. Jin is well below what I\u2019d expect from this\ntype of character. I know it\u2019s typical of movies like these to include a\nrelatable fish-out-of-water character who isn\u2019t happy about the inconvenience,\nbut this kid\u2019s voice is set unwaveringly to \u201cwhine\u201d for at least the first two\nthirds of the movie. Maybe it\u2019s because these characters are so\ncookie-cutter\/unlikeable that I never got invested in their scenes of character\ndevelopment. I know I\u2019m supposed to respect these scenes, but I couldn\u2019t help\nbut want to see the film kick back over to action and jokes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What the film lacks in\ninteresting heroes, it makes up for in interesting villains. Burnish has a\nweird love\/hate relationship with nature, having deprived himself of it for\nseveral years following a falling-out that he took personally. He\u2019s the same\nway around people, come to think of it. Zara\u2019s loyalty to Burnish is never on\nsolid footing, but it gets even less reliable as the film goes on. Burnish\u2019s\nunnamed head of security gets to steal a few scenes. And while by no means a\nvillain, a near-extinct creature called a Whooping Snake exists in Burnish\u2019s\ncamp solely to rattle the antagonist and tempt him into reconsidering that\n\u201cnear-\u201d part. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAbominable\u201d is fine\noutside of Jin weighing it down. It doesn\u2019t do as much wrong as the trailers\nsuggest (at no point does Yi introduce Everest to the music of Taylor Swift or\nplay Fleetwood Mac on her violin), but it isn\u2019t terribly inspired either. There\nare gags and moments that work, but they\u2019re exceptions, not the rule. If the\nkids really want to go to a movie, this is as good a choice as you\u2019re going to\nfind right now, but otherwise I\u2019d say stay home and watch the sadly-overlooked \u201cMissing\nLink,\u201d one of the best films of the year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grade: C<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAbominable\u201d is rated PG for some\naction and mild rude humor. Its running time is 97 minutes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Bob Garver When I first heard that I\u2019d be reviewing an animated movie called \u201cAbominable\u201d this weekend, I was excited. I couldn\u2019t wait to see a movie about… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":44907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44906"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}