Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) Review

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)
Directors: Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham
Screenwriter: Mark Burton
Starring: Ben Whitehead, Peter Kay, Reece Shearsmith, Lauren Patel, Diane Morgan, Adjoa Andoh, Lenny Henry

Although they have starred in commercials and other such materials in the interim, the Wallace and Gromit franchise hasn’t seen an official entry into the series since 2008’s A Matter of Loaf and Death. Part of this was a result of Peter Sallis’ retirement from voice acting in 2010, followed by his death in 2017, with Ben Whitehead taking over the role in the meantime. The difficulties with their past partners in DreamWorks during their time making the previous feature-length instalment, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which included constant notes to change the film to make it more attractive to American child viewers, put creator Nick Park off doing another feature for a long time. And yet, after the longest gap between official Wallace and Gromit films in history, the cheese-loving inventor and his heroic dog have returned for their second feature length adventure. And this time, it’s a legacy sequel…

Even with his popularity (and penchant for haunting the childhoods of British children), nobody expected the return of criminal mastermind Feathers McGraw, the evil, rubber-gloved penguin and diamond thief, who first appeared in 1992’s The Wrong Trousers. Fifteen years after the penguin’s incarceration (possibly, the timeline is a bit wobbly), Wallace has invented a Smart Gnome called Norbot (voiced by Reece Shearsmith) to help Gromit do the gardening. Upon hearing of this invention, Feathers manages to hack into the gnome in a plan to escape his prison at the Zoo and steal back the Blue Diamond before fleeing Yorkshire. It is, as usual, up to Gromit to get his paws dirty and convince everyone, including the police, that it is Feathers who is using Norbot for evil, and not Wallace.

Stepping back into the madcap Claymation world of Wallace and Gromit is always, without fail, an utter delight, and Vengeance Most Fowl doesn’t fail to deliver on that front. The characters are exactly as you remember them, and Whitehouse’s voice acting, whilst not exactly the same as Sallis, is close enough that 90% of the time you forget that it’s a different actor behind the clay. After so long off our screens in their own mainline adventure, Aardman could have quite easily decided to change them to show some kind of development or maturity over time. A more grizzled Wallace, perhaps. But, unlike his favourite cheese, the pair never change, remaining just what you want them to be.

Feathers McGraw similarly, despite getting much of his evil scheme wonderfully from Batman Returns, is still the same. He still sweats when the pressure is on in the midst of a daring piece of knavery, he still has a flair for drama, he has still got that almost-unblinking stare that portrays more malice and terror than thousands of actors over their entire careers. For the series’ most enduring villain, it’s fitting that he has returned for this legacy sequel.

If Aardman never made another Wallace and Gromit film, this would be the perfect way to end it.

It’s all about getting the band back together one final time, like the gunslinger coming out of retirement for one last job. Smaller references to the earlier in films, such as the moon being made of cheese according to a captcha quiz for A Grand Day Out, to bigger parts such as Peter Kay’s P. C. Mackintosh returning from The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, make it perfectly in-keeping with the big franchises in Hollywood, yet it all fits in nicely with the overarching theme of Wallace coming to understand truly how much he needs Gromit to keep him out of mischief. Gromit, the dog who gets moved aside in every film yet is always there to save the day, finally sees Wallace admit that he is constantly wrong. It’s a tearjerker for sure, especially for anyone that has grown up with the franchise throughout their childhoods and lives in general.

Everything is all here, from the copious film references (including, along with the aforementioned Batman Returns, references to The Matrix, Skyfall, and even obscure ones such as Final Destination and Vincent Price’s The Abominable Dr Phibes) to the bad jokes and dog-related puns. The visual gags are a dozen a second, done with such intricacy and craft that you’ll find more and more every five times you rewatch it. Aardman seem to have managed to keep the American paws of Netflix off meddling with the film, Netflix being the company for the film’s international distribution. The use of a garden gnome as the lynchpin of most of the narrative proves this, if nothing else, and the return of the Yorkshire border as a stand-in for the US-Mexico border that appeared briefly in A Matter of Loaf and Death doubles down on it. It’s not to do with London, it’s to do with thick local accents and teapots and terraced housing, complete with a final chase in canal barges that might possibly be a reference to the boat-chase finale from the Sherlock Holmes novel “The Sign of the Four”.

If it falls from perfection, that’s a result of a few minor points. There are a number of very contemporarily fixed jokes with relation to captcha quizzes, and even Norbot being a ‘Smart’ gnome (one wonders if they’ll still be called ‘Smartphones’ in 50 years time) might date the film as time goes on, whereas the other films manage largely to avoid such a pitfall. It is a film very much made for the early 2020s audience, and that means it loses the tiniest amount of timeless magic it has in abundance. In addition, even though they’re still there, it’s harder and harder to see the fingerprints in the clay, the little bumps and imperfections that made the films so completely human. They are there, but at times you have to squint a little. It’s a fairly clean film, which works both for and against Aardman. Beautiful films are one thing, as long as you keep the craft, and there are times when the sparkle almost threatens that.

The other issue is that many of the other films are done so beautifully that it is such a gargantuan task to even get in the same ballpark, with a combination of heart, humour, and a slightly carnivalesque, unhinged sense of English madness.

Vengeance Most Fowl is a massively entertaining, frenetic, off-the-wall ride for the whole family, and though that slight maniacal streak might not be fully in the film’s DNA, it’s still damn fun, and it’s still 100% Wallace and Gromit, crafted with real hands and real people and real talent. That’s the most beautiful aspect of the whole film.

Score: 20/24

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