MOVIE REVIEWS: TURBO

The premise alone should be enough to earn Turbo a star or two from critics — a snail dreams of entering the Indianapolis 500 — and probably has. But the movie does well by most critics on a number of other levels, too. Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times writes: “The film takes a little longer than it should to get everybody to Indianapolis, but that’s a minor quibble. Because once we get there, the Indy 500 is wonderfully wild. There are so many ways to crash and smash the cars as they roar around the track. And for a snail, even a super-charged one _ you cannot imagine the perils, the pitfalls, the pit crews … Thankfully there is plenty of animation wizardry to take care of that for you.” Several critics forgive the fact that the film breaks no new ground. Lou Lumenic in the New York Post comments: “Let’s just say there are no surprises here, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing in a film that’s aimed mostly at the under-10 set. Mercifully, the characters and the comedy are just sophisticated enough to keep their minders from drifting off.” On the other hand, A.O. Scott in the New York Times observes that this is but the latest animated film about an animal character trying to overcome its limitations. But, in America, he notes, “anything is possible, including that millions of parents and children might flock to this adequate morsel of committee-produced entertainment. They don’t call it DreamWorks for nothing. But it is interesting to note that a movie strenuously preaching the virtue of being different should be so fundamentally — so deliberately, so timidly — just like everything else of its kind.”