lightning-quickAmerica: The Motion Picture premieres Wednesday, June 30 on Netflix.
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From Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The LEGO Movie) and Archer’s Adam Reed comes a raunchy and riotous retelling of the Revolutionary War that feels like Drunk History had a one night stand with The Naked Gun and then gave birth to a history report by Bill and Ted if they never had a time machine. This animated adventure, from first-time feature director Matt Thompson (also Archer), can, at times, exhaust with its over-the-top antics and unabashed insanity, but overall it’s a worthwhile watch featuring a fun voice cast and awesomely nutty anachronisms.
To its hilarious benefit, America: The Motion Picture is presented without context. There’s no bookend letting us know that this is a dumb person’s account of the founding of our nation or even, like, Princess Bride-style interludes showing a grandfather reading uproariously wrong information off the internet to his grandkid. We just get the story as-is. Out of the gate, it’s just a bonkers chronicle of 1776 that features a werewolf Benedict Arnold blowing up most of the founding fathers and then killing Abe Lincoln in front of Abe’s BFF George Washington. Just about every aspect of American political history, including quotes from presidents 200 years later, is jammed into a blender and minced up into a deranged action movie.
Channing Tatum, who also serves as executive producer here, provides pure Golden Retriever meathead joy as George Washington, once again reminding us how freakin’ funny he is. In fact, if it helps, just imagine that this movie is the result of a homework assignment by Tatum’s 21 Jump Street character, Jenko. It’s that blissfully boneheaded.
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Backed up by Jason Mantzoukas as Sam Adams, Raoul Trujillo as Geronimo, Bobby Moynihan as Paul Revere, and Olivia Munn as a gender-flipped electro-gauntleted Thomas Edison, Washington must thwart an evil plot by Andy Samberg’s Benedict Arnold and Simon Pegg’s King James (which some may not even realize is a just plain wrong) to turn all the colonists British by steeping them in tea. This formidable cast, which also includes Judy Greer and Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike, all wonderfully understand the rapid-fire pace and the satirical tone.
Stretching this type of lightning quick humor out to 90 minutes is a challenge though, and there are times when jokes don’t land well, or at all, simply because they’re not given time to breathe. It’s why most of the time this format is relegated to 22-minute episodes. It’s just better in small batches. This is the main thing that holds America: The Motion Picture back a bit. Despite it being, more or less, supersonic Mel Brooks, the style doesn’t easily lend itself to feature-length projects. That being said, there are so many jokes here, and they move so fast, that it’s easy enough to glaze over and dip out every so often and then pop back in refreshed.
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America: The Motion picture also takes no prisoners, topic-wise. It both embraces the innate earnestness and innocent idiocy of American jingoism while also never letting our heroes off the hook for being racist and misogynistic. Even as some of our heroes learn valuable lessons — usually because they’re educated by Geronimo, Edison, or Killer Mike’s Blacksmith (aka “Black Smith”) — the film never presents the country as anything other than a noble experiment on the precipice of implosion. Even if, going by action movies, America is the rogue cop who doesn’t play by the rules the story is hyper-aware that there’s something deeply wrong with that type of heroics.
Skewering everything from Star Wars to Fast and Furious to even Harry and the Hendersons, the film is great at lassoing different blips from pop culture in a way where the larger story still makes sense, in its own goofy way. Sure, Big Ben turns into a giant mech and people openly use machine guns and holograms but it’s all in service of calling out, and laughing at, the U.S.’s societal and cultural issues and ills. This movie and 2004’s Team America: World Police would make for an excellent double feature on any given Independence Day.
