★★☆☆☆
You want to love this film. You want to loudly applaud its pedigree. It is produced by the Bristol-based Aardman Animations, home of Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep and lovingly tended stop-frame features that are the rightful envy of the creative world. It is directed by Nick Park, back at the helm for the first time in a decade (he last directed in 2008, with A Matter of Loaf and Death). It is voiced by a cast of peerless homegrown heavyweights (most notably Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne) and has a proudly eccentric strain of humour that laughs in the face of Pixar-style universalism and instead delivers decidedly local nods to the Goodies, Monty Python and the Carry On movies. Yet despite all this, sadly, tragically, Early Man is just not very good.
The problem is the central concept. It’s about a Stone Age tribe from Manchester who discover a modestly sized meteorite and use it to invent football, and how one of their descendants, Dug (Redmayne), is drawn into a grudge match with a far superior tribe of Bronze Age sophisticates, ruled over by the evil Lord Nooth (Hiddleston).
Will Dug’s team of plucky but amateurish Neanderthal novices beat Nooth’s team of snobbish Premier League professionals? Or will, er, Nooth’s team beat Dug’s team? Or, might Dug’s team, ahem, draw with Nooth’s team? Because that, alas, is all that Park and co have given us in terms of narrative sustenance. There is simply nothing else there. The characters are wafer-thin (Redmayne is playing “sympathetic”, while Hiddleston is doing “French”). The subplots are nonexistent.
In a global animation market, where the Hollywood champs Pixar frequently layer their tales into dense and rewarding narrative structures with interpenetrating character connections (see the myriad moving family backstories in the recent Coco), this flimsy derby-day set-up would be a side story at best, or most likely a running joke, or a visual gag (a TV show such as Family Guy would nail the entire story structure of Early Man in a five-second interstitial bite).
Seemingly aware of its significant limitations, the film quickly falls back on to Aardman’s strengths — kooky superfluous gags. There’s a sweet Goodies nod with a giant mallard. Hiddleston goes very ’Allo ’Allo! with Nooth. And there’s one great pun concerning Early Man United. But mostly even the gags don’t help. Some of them misfire badly (a recurring joke about a player’s “tackle” becomes wearisome). Some of them are dead on arrival (“He thinks it’s all over” etc). Yet mostly they only add to the sense of an increasingly uninspired film desperately attempting to cover its inadequacies.
PG, 89min