Based on the series of video games of the same name, Ratchet & Clank is mostly a retelling of the story of the first game. Mechanic Ratchet (James Arnold Taylor) dreams of joining The Galactic Rangers, a group of heroes that regularly save this particular region of space. It just so happens that they’re looking for a new member to help deal with a new threat. Ratchet isn’t accepted at first, but with the help of Clank (David Kaye), a defective robot from the new threat’s factory, Ratchet manages to save the Rangers and join their ranks.
That might already sound like the plot of the whole movie, but it’s just beginning. From there, the film follows Ratchet as he rockets to fame as the new member of the Galactic Rangers. It follows the Rangers as they try to get to the bottom of the villain’s plan. The film deals with the growing jealousy among the ranks of the Rangers due to Ratchet becoming the center of attention. And so on. It certainly feels like the kind of story a video game might tell. There’s several hours worth of plot hooks that this film might have followed. It stuffs it all into a standard movie mold, the story turning into a mishmash of elements that don’t really work.
Not enough effort was put into making this plot work as a feature length film. The most substantial changes have to do with Ratchet, who is turned into a very generic children’s movie lead in a very clumsy way. The movie can’t actually decide what his character arc is supposed to be. He starts out as an overambitious mechanic that gets his dreams shut down. And then, it’s kind of about him learning to deal with fame. And then it’s also about him learning to accept his failures. And also, it’s about him putting faith in other people.
Any one of those might have made for a good story, but the film just haphazardly switches between them. It mostly ends up making the character really unlikable. And most of the other characters don’t get nearly enough definition to matter. With the way the film ends, it feels like we really ought to care about the relationship between the two titular characters. But Clank is basically a non-entity. There isn’t nearly enough between him and Ratchet to give any of their interactions any emotional heft.
What the film does have are jokes. Some of it is funny. Some of it is theoretically funny, but the execution is off. A lot of the runners, like the extra line underneath the text that introduces every new location, aren’t really funny at all. This feels like a script that got a lot of punch-ups, just a whole room of writers pitching jokes to make up for the weakness of the narrative. The voice work is all right, if not entirely memorable. There are a surprising number of big names in this cast, but they don’t feel vital to these roles.
At best, Ratchet & Clank offers a couple of jokes that land pretty well. But it just doesn’t know how to tell its story. It feels like this is the kind of narrative that should have been told over the course of TV series, parceled out thirty minutes at a time, allowing the characters and the story some room to breathe. Or really, it’s a story that’s better told in a video game, with every level providing a chapter break, creating the proper context for these shifts in narrative focus. In a video game, variation is welcome. In a movie, consistency of tone and narrative tends to work better.
My Rating:
