Wreck It Ralph Breaks The Internet


Tonight, with nothing else to do, I went to watch the sequel to Wreck It Ralph. This could have been a very bad idea – Wreck It Ralph has the kind of lethal emotional payload where you go in thinking you’re watching some sacharrine animated entertainment, and come out 90 minutes later weeping because somebody poured a load of Mentos into some Coke. No, really. You’re crying, I’m not crying.
Although the sequel has a further meditation on the nature of friendship and its mutability, and despite the emotional wringer I’ve been through in the last couple of weeks, it seems they didn’t quite rebottle the magic because I didn’t come out of the cinema in floods of tears. But is that such a bad thing?

The sequel starts with Vanelope a bit bored, and Ralph quite happy in his routine. Vanelope’s arcade game gets broken and so the pair have to quest across the Internet to find a way to repair it. There’s huge amounts of product placement from all the internet companies of today (which may make this film horribly dated in a decade’s time, or it may just not matter). There are references to Friendster that I fear few people will ever get, (whither eBay?) and there’s a wonderful car chase including Gil Gadot, as well as a joyful scene with almost every Disney princess you can think of (and I few I just didn’t recognise).

Everything ends up ok in the end, although in such a way that the universe has definitely been changed. There’s an inspiringly good joke about the perfect way to raise children at the end, and the film doesn’t try to set everything back to the way it started at the end. I feel confident that the two films are a complete piece, and there’s no need for a third.

But then the money machine is making Toy Story 4, however unlikely that felt.
[tags Wreck It Ralph, John C Reilly, crying[

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