While The Angry Birds Movie won’t actually start screening in US theaters until May 20, the first few reviews have appeared – and, well, it looks like audiences will be more indifferent than angry.
On the more positive end of the scale, Variety’s Guy Lodge declares that The Angry Birds Movie is “rich in color, energy and perfectly dreadful puns”. Befitting a movie based on something as stripped-down as a mobile game, it is said to adopt a “loose, elastic approach to its larger narrative, with frequent detours to fill in daffier details of its mad, mad, mad, mad story world.”
However, British magazine Empire’s John Nugent seems to think that the movie’s attempts to replicate the feel of the game were doomed to failure. Pointing out that “there is no obviously compelling story bursting to escape from a cartoon bird being catapulted into a green pig”, he opines that “the transition from phone screen to cinema screen feels retrofitted and clumsy throughout.”
As we write, The Angry Birds Movie currently has an overall rating of 49 out of 100 on the cultural criticism aggregator site Metacritic, which takes account of two positive and two negative reviews. You can watch the above trailer to judge for yourself how much you personally might like this visually wacky adventure.