Kim Possible

Hey, kids, I’m about to launch into an introductory bit comprising stories of my youth that tend to reveal too much about myself.  If that ain’t your bag, feel free to skip down to around the poster.  See yinz in a bit!

For the rest of you, I’m old enough to remember Kim Possible coming out whilst in high school.  At the time I mainly watched for star Christy Romano, whom I had a massive crush on.  (Seriously, the later episodes and movie finale of Even Stevens hooked me onto her, and a good part of my applying to Columbia for undergrad revolved around the incredibly off chance that we’d bump into each other on campus and one thing would lead to matrimonial another.  Shut up, I know I was stupid, you don’t have to rub it in.  (I didn’t get in anyway…))  I stayed, though, for some entertaining animated action.  The voice work was superb, the action was solid, the dialogue and interplay was pretty good, it was an all-around really good show.  I may have had some issues with the movies, but nothing major.  Years later, with nostalgia goggles apparently glued to faces by government agents (or, rather, faceless corporations tapping into pre-existing markets and properties from years past and we peons falling for it every fucking time, whichever sounds more plausible), we were inundated with rumors of remakes, reboots, and live action adaptations.  None of them ever materialized, so I was able to sleep soundly about the idea, hoping beyond hope that one of these bad ideas had finally fallen by the wayside.  Nope.

This is America, kids.

Welcome back.  (You, not the characters.)

So in their infinite money-grubbing and creatively-bankrupt wisdom, the folks at Disney decided the time was right to resurrect the character in her own Disney Channel Original Movie.  But, due to age and appearance and ability restrictions, Romano was replaced by young Sadie Stanley, while all of the other characters (apart from Rufus and Professor Dementor) also had actor shifts, if for no other reason than to make the live-action action actually work.  No problem with the idea there, but the actors here are mostly pretty bad.  (I know it’s probably wrong to criticize child actors, but I’ve long since stopped caring.  Feel free to throw some stones my way, especially considering they’re all still better than me, I freely admit.)  Stanley lacks any amount of screen presence and is constantly outshone by pretty much everyone around her, including Connie Ray (playing Kim’s grandmother/sensei), who’s still, nice to say, going strong.  Sean Giambrone is easily the worst part of the production, making Ron into even more of a weenie than he already was and adding an incredibly annoying affectation to the character.  I wanted to smack my ears off every time he was on screen and speaking.  Romano makes a cameo appearance as a pop star, and it just hurts to watch.  Alyson Hannigan is blatantly sleepwalking as Kim’s mother (who’s not just an incredibly smart scientist here, but also apparently something of an actioner herself, for some reason), and Michael Northey’s Barkin ignores everything about that character aside from his authoritarianism, and even that’s barely there.

And that’s endemic of the film’s structural issues:  The film is apparently something of a prequel to the series, having her just starting out high school – whereas she was already entrenched there in the show – and all, but it ignores and/or alters much of the past continuity, like Kim’s outfit, Barkin’s personality, even the sport Kim engages in: screw cheerleading, that’s apparently not as conducive to action-scene-style staging, so we’re shifting things to soccer.  Thanks.

Worse, the script exacerbates this issue by treating the characters (and the audience) like idiots.  The story follows Kim and Ron failing at their early high school days.  They take a fellow struggler under their wing (let’s be real, it’s Kim’s wing, but Ron’s there), but she soon proves to just be better than Kim, making the latter jealous.  Meanwhile, Drakken and Shego plot against her.  All along the way, the characters sorta try to capture the earlier quality of the series, but they fail miserably.  Drakken’s reading of a book of teenage slang, sounding just as stilted and wrong as one would imagine, is a strong representation of the script as a whole.  The story, unsurprisingly, fails just as hard, trying to force some sort of importance-of-friendship-and-being-a-good-person message into things, but it falls apart because of obvious twists being obvious and the fact that the source of all of this emotionality is something that can’t (or, maybe more properly, shouldn’t) elicit anything of the sort.

Further digging the film’s grave is the same garbage-fire production design as The Descendants and other DCOMs of late.  The visual effects are almost entirely bad (some solid robotic effects late in the game try to salvage things, but the damage by that point is done), and the compositing is terrible throughout.  The effects on Rufus are particularly eye-gouging, though all of the dodgy computer effects smack of terrible.  This is likely a result of the understandably low budget, but I side with Josh Hadley here: if you can’t afford to do it right, don’t do it!  The films feels even cheaper than it is, and amateur YouTube personalities look to have better skills.

There are occasionally tiny bits of okay things here and there, like Patton Oswalt doing his Dementor thing and Taylor Ortega’s Shego (she is the highlight of the film by a massive margin!), but even those are marred by the production:  They couldn’t be arsed to provide any makeup for Oswalt, so the sallow Dementor is now just some pasty dude in leather, and Shego isn’t the main focus of the film for some reason.  I think I laughed at one of Ron’s lines, and my shock almost literally knocked me off of my chair.

Overall, though, this is some trash right here.  It’s likely gonna do well enough for Disney, who sounds like they’re already planning sequels (kill me now), but beyond the idea of nostalgia goggles being worn while watching this, I can’t imagine why.  Nothing works aside from Shego, and everything is poorly done in the loudest way possible.  Skip it, kids, it ain’t worth it.