Spirit Untamed is a movie I wasn’t even all that aware existed until maybe two weeks ago, the sort of the movie that I would have seen a trailer for a few dozen times before I actually went off to see it with my normal habit of going to the movies once or twice a week. But I wasn’t, and since I stream most of my home entertainment, I don’t see many commercials either. Bottom line is, I didn’t know this was coming, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t give it a look.
Then again, it’s also apparently a spin-off of a hand-drawn feature Dreamworks put out back in 2002 where Matt Damon voiced Spirit. The horse doesn’t talk in this version.
Young Lucky Prescott (voice of Isabela Merced) lost her mother, a trick rider, to some sort of an accident when Lucky was a baby. She was sent to live with her grandfather, but she got into a lot of trouble over the years. After ruining her railroad baron grandpa’s campaign for governor launch party, Lucky is sent off with her Aunt Cora (Julianne Moore) to stay with her overly cautious father Jim (Jake Gyllenhaal). But Jim lives out in the frontier, and Lucky finds herself sympathizing with a wild stallion that she names Spirit. Spirit was captured by some rustlers, led by Hendricks (Walton Goggins), for some vaguely defined profit, and as the rustlers are also after the rest of Spirit’s herd, it will be up to Lucky to tame Spirit enough to ride him and then, with her new friends Pru (Marsai Martin) and Abigail (Mckenna Grace), rescue the rest of the horses, all while disobeying her father who is worried he will lose his daughter the same way he did her mom.
If that all sounds rather familiar, there’s a good reason for it: this is a very familiar story. Not in the sense that I remembered the original movie because I don’t think I have ever seen it. No, it is in the sense that the story and its beats are incredibly familiar. Lucky is the spunky girl who wants to have adventures but tends to screw things up. Her father loves her, but he’s overly cautious until the time is right at the end to believe in her. The bad guys are just formidable enough to be a challenge for a couple of young girls and a wild horse. Toss in some bland and forgettable pop songs, and the story could be any number of animated features.
That could be made up for if the animation was good. Now, there are shots that look good, but for the most part, the character design is rather standard for CGI characters, and I wasn’t too impressed with things like facial expressions. I did think the Hendricks character seemed to look a lot like a character Leonardo DiCaprio might play in a Quentin Tarrantino movie, so maybe it was appropriate the character was voiced by another of Tarrantino’s more recent regulars. So, the animation wasn’t that impressive and the story was far too familiar.
Now, it wasn’t what I would call “bad,” so much as it is what I might consider to be just stunningly average. It’ll be fine for kids, it won’t offend the parents, but there’s nothing really all that special on display here. If anything, it clocks in at just under an hour and a half, so if nothing else, it’s not that long, and it’ll probably keep young kids entertained for the run time.
Grade: C
0 Comments