STORKS (Nicholas Stoller, Doug Sweetland). 92 minutes. Opens Thursday (September 22). See listings. Rating: NNN
Storks shouldn’t work as well as it does. The animated pic often feels like it’s ticking off a checklist of ways to pander to kids, with talking animals, flying gizmos and a plot that feels bastardized from Monsters, Inc.
As Junior, a stork trying to climb the corporate ladder in an Amazon-like delivery operation, Andy Samberg fails to muster a personality by moaning and groaning. Katie Crown fares somewhat better as Tulip, the 18-year-old orphan who’s the reason why these storks deliver cellphones instead of babies.
She accidentally switches on the great big baby-making machine, leaving her and Junior with a giggly little infant to deliver.
It’s slapdash stuff, but a steady stream of antic and inventive set pieces makes it fun. There’s the chase with a pack of wolves who bound together into Lego-like formations when they need a bridge, a boat or a submarine. There’s a smackdown with penguins who share Junior and Tulip’s interest in not waking up the sleeping baby, so the whole thing goes down hilariously in near-silence. And then the movie gets pretty clever in the ways it tortures our winged hero with the one thing he can’t see: glass.
It’s like writer and co-director Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Five-Year Engagement) didn’t get the memo. He refuses to let Storks settle for the lazy cash grab it was clearly designed to be. Lucky us.
