 Is Disney's newest film on Disney Plus worth a watch or should you move onward to something else? That was terrible. And this is a review for Onward. I know Onward went to theaters for a little while but left pretty quickly due to some sort of world event that was taking place at the time. I don't know. It's hard to recall. It's hard to remember what was going on then. Certainly not happening now. My wife, two children and myself watched Onward today. Here's a little gauge of how that went. My wife fell asleep at about the halfway mark. That doesn't mean anything. You know when she falls asleep during Rick and Morty. So just an awful person to begin with. My kids both made it through fine. My daughter thought it was decent. My son thought it was pretty good. And I think I stand by my kids if nothing else. I am a proud parent and I stand by their movie review, their movie critique. If you're unclear for some reason as to what Onward is and you stumbled upon this video which is probably like the 30th page in the search results. Let me break it down quickly. It's a Pixar animated film. It takes place in a fantasy world. It's a fantasy film in a suburban town. I can't remember the name of it. And it follows two brothers as they try to bring their father fully back from the dead after screwing up a spell. I mean they didn't really screw it up. The wand was hard to control. That's the bottom line. They had a wand, a staff I guess was hard to control. And now they're on a quest to fully bring the father back so they can say their goodbyes. Or an E in the main protagonist's case. Hello and goodbye. Aloha. He's never met his father before. E died before he was born. Cards on the table. I wasn't that interested in the movie when I saw the trailers. And if I hadn't known Pixar was involved I would not have guessed it was a Pixar film. It felt more like a DreamWorks type of situation. Although I think DreamWorks is putting out better films too. Between How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda. This falls below those I think pretty easily. There's nothing bad about this movie. It looks nice. It's got some good voice acting from Tom Holland and Chris Pratt and a couple other characters. You know it moves quick enough. There isn't a lot of lulls. It's just it's so kind of by the numbers. You know the protagonist is very kind of unsure of himself. A little bit helpless. He's socially awkward. He's Tom Holland in all of his movies. It's such a played out concept especially in the animated realm. And even more especially in Pixar's case. We've seen this character time and time again. And nothing against Chris Pratt. I really like him as Andy in Parks and Rec and as Star Lord. I don't know if he's kind of played out for me or if he's wearing on me a little bit. But here I just thought God Jack Black would have been so much better at this character. Jack Black was like bread for this character. He's done this type of character multiple times and he's perfected it. Everything from that video game that no one really remembers where he's got a guitar. He fights bad guys to Tenacious Deep. You know some of his songs have a very stoic old school Middle Earth vibe to him. He's just he's just that guy. And Chris Pratt feels like he's doing an interpretation of Jack Black playing an elf. If you're a parent wondering if it's okay if you're kids. Even though it takes place in a world full of dragons and goblins and all sorts of scary creatures. There's nothing in this that I think is remotely scary. You find scarier sections in a Toy Story film. So yeah this one's this one's just pretty easy bake of and all around. The visuals are of course great but I don't think stylistically it went near as far as it could have. I don't remember a lot of shots really standing out. And for a movie that takes place in this you know world of dragons and fairies and elves and so forth. You'd think you'd have more of those picturesque landscape shots and nothing really wowed me in that department which is a real shame. And I'd say the same for the music. Everything is very serviceable and nothing's bad but nothing's great either. And that's the problem for me. It's easy to watch. You know if you have Disney plus I definitely I definitely put it on. It's a nice hour and 45 minutes. I was just hoping for more especially on a personal note since I lost my father when I was 16. So I thought for sure by the end of this movie I was just going to be a sobbing mess. And to that point the last 20 25 minutes are really damn good. And there is some tear jerking stuff for sure. It's just I thought I could have hit even harder. I thought that everything leading up to it was pretty humdrum. That's an expression. But yeah that final act definitely saves this thing from being just a total forgettable mess. And it's definitely something I'd watch. I just probably wouldn't ever watch it again.