Directors: Tyree Dillihay, Adam Rosette
Writers: Aaron Buchsbaum, Teddy Riley, Chris Tougas
Stars: Caleb McLaughlin, Gabrielle Union, Nick Kroll
Synopsis: A small goat with big dreams gets a once-in-a-lifetime shot to join the pros and play roarball, a high-intensity, co-ed, full-contact sport dominated by the fastest, fiercest animals in the world.
Plenty will marvel at Goat, I am guessing mostly for the film critic dad-joke puns, hoping for exposure for a quote pull that will be a slam dunk. See what I did there? However, the latest animated feature from Sony’s burgeoning animation division, which is anchored by the amazing Spider-Verse franchise, is a combination of other cartoons, but not nearly as well-executed, and is hardly “nothing but net.”
Simply put, Goat is all flash, a considerable amount of technical, candy-colored flash, with little originality and nothing but recycled substance.
The story follows a “small,” which refers to almost anyone who has ever tried to play basketball but couldn’t make the team because of their genetics. That would be Will Harris (Stranger Things alum Caleb McLaughlin), a teenage boar goat who dreams of being a professional basketball player in the Roarball League. However, as he gets older, Will’s dream appears to be farther from reality.
Will still holds onto that dream, however, while continuing to cheer for the league’s greatest of all time, Jett Fillmore (Top Five’s Gabrielle Union), known as the “Face of Thorns.” An all-star, she is a black panther who is always on the prowl for the hoop. She won a championship for the Vineland Thorns years prior, but now they are the worst team in the league. That’s when team owner Flor Everson (Broadway royalty Jenifer Lewis) has an idea.
To boost ticket sales, she signs Will to a contract after a video of him goes viral, showing him breaking the ankles of the Mane Attraction (Rebel Ridge’s Aaron Pierre) in a pickup game, and viewing him as more of a novelty than someone with genuine talent and skill. Of course, Jett, the legend, team captain, and front-office executive, is flabbergasted at the idea of a “small” playing on her squad.
What happens next in Goat is predictable, contrived, and, when the film tries to channel family-friendly themes, trivial. The movie was produced by Stephen Curry, who obviously relates to the underdog story, given his rise to basketball greatness from a small college in North Carolina. He must have felt a kinship with the source material. Based on the book “Funky Dunks” by Chris Tougas, the film lays on the themes thick, almost sacrificing humor for preachiness.
While the film tries, and tries too hard, to be family-friendly, the rest of it is uninspired. Director Tyree Dillihay (Bob’s Burgers, Axe Cop), working from a watered-down script by the writing team of Aaron Buchsbaum (Psych) and Teddy Riley (Shangri Dawn), never finds a basketball scene or cliché it doesn’t love to recycle. For instance, there is a scene clearly stolen from the 1993 Super Bowl advertisement, “The Showdown,” starring Michael Jordan and Larry Bird.
You need to find a niche for comic relief in a movie like this. Remember, the Minions were a sideshow before striking it big with Despicable Me. The best joke comes from Will’s landlord, voiced by Wayne Knight, and his thousands of gerbil children. Besides one snarky comment from Patton Oswalt, who plays a proboscis monkey and head coach, I don’t remember laughing once.
Perhaps most importantly, neither did any kids at the Saturday morning screening I attended. This family film is tiresome, tries too hard, and never plays the game naturally. Curry and company forget the fundamentals, running a frantic full-court press on the audience before finally traveling its way to the buzzer. And at this point, I’m committing more basketball puns than the film commits traveling violations. See how flashy, but lazy and repetitive that is?
Now you know what it is like to sit through Goat.
You can watch Goat only in theaters starting February 13th!
