One cannot talk about Sing without having to start by talking about how fucking mercenary Sing is. It’s the second release from Illumination Entertainment (or Patient Zero for the Minions virus which has decimated the population) this year, following the blatant Toy Story knock-off The Secret Life of Pets, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the movie has been in production since 2014, it would be incredibly tempting to deem this a knock-off of this year’s Zootopia. You see, this movie has a world of talking animals too, but instead of being metaphors for race relations (that’s not a subject that comes up or likely to come to mind of anyone working on the film, given that the criminal characters in the film are gorillas), they sing their little hearts out. The songs they sing (all 85 of them, a figure prominently featured in the lead-up to the film’s release) are either pop songs instantly recognizable to kids these days, like “Shake it Off” and “Call Me Maybe”, or classics the parents know and love, from the likes of Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, Elton John, and yes, Leonard Cohen (there’s also the occasional song that’s the best of neither world, namely Crazy Town’s “Butterfly”). Illumination is casting as wide a net for the audience of this movie as possible, and it’s kind of goddamn disgusting.

And yet, I had some hope for this movie. You see, Illumination’s normal director, Chris Renuad, sits this one out, and the reins are given over to Garth Jennings. Jennings is not a household name, but chances are extremely good you’ve seen and loved his work. His forte was music videos, directing the iconic ones for Blur’s “Coffee and TV”, Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here Right Now”, and R.E.M.’s “Imitation of Life”, plus countless other great ones. His work showcases a visual sophistication and wit that, in conjunction with his working so closely with music, suggests that Jennings could make this film feel less diabolically corporate, especially considering he also wrote the script. Oh reader, how I wished Jennings would pull this one off. Alas…

Sing is bookended by two scenes of power. As the film opens, Jennings explores the theater that will be the main setting of the film, and makes it look like a place of pure beauty and wonder. And as this happens, the stage is lit up when a sheep (voiced by Jennifer Hudson) belts out “Golden Slumbers”, part of one of the most moving and cathartic pieces of music ever made. The point is easy to discern and it’s this; art is a beautiful thing. This message continues at the film’s end, when “Slumbers” is reprised over a time-lapse-aping shot of the theater being reconstructed back to its former glory. Those scenes are good. Shame about everything frickin’ else. It’s like an Oreo with only air between the two cookies.

The film’s lead is Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey, dropping his accent), a koala who’s first seen in that opening as a young boy, wowed by the theater and soon to own it. His shows are flops and the theater is falling apart, and in order to get an audience to save the theater, he elects to hold a singing competition. He initially sets the prize at $1000, but a mishap with his assistant’s glass eye (seriously) bumps the prize to $100,000, which seems like a much bigger deal than it ends up being. Anyway, all kinds of animals try out, and the ones chosen to perform all have backstories seemingly inspired by Jennings trying to include as much of Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary in his film as he can. I will list these stories individually now.

• Scarlett Johansson plays Ash, a teenage porcupine. Her plots are a mishmash of various “girl power” cliches. She performs with her boyfriend (Beck Bennett), who wants her to be more Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown and less Uma Thurman in Sweet and Lowdown. He cheats on her with an airhead porcupine named Becky, and she’s left as a solo act in the competition. She’s then forced to play up the girly-girl image when practicing for the show, performing “Call Me Maybe” in a dress (in case you’re wondering, yes, that Matthew McConaughey koala shakes his little ass to “Call Me Maybe”). By the end, she rejects that overt femininity, her boyfriend, and being held to someone else’s vision by performing a rocking number about independence that’s so forgettable it could have actual nuclear codes in the lyrics and I’d be none the wiser. In case you’re wondering, yes, she does shoot needles at people at least once during the movie.
• Seth MacFarlane plays Mike, a crooner mouse. Even for a Seth MacFarlane character, Mike is uniquely loathsome. He starts the film as an asshole, hassling people on the street for money as he plays saxophone, and somehow only devolves from there. He is the only one in the movie who actually cares all that much about the prize money, and money seems to be his only joy in life, much more than singing (I don’t think there’s a scene of him singing in between his audition and his big final performance). He insults the other contestants and soon enough gets in debt with Russians (bears, of course). As a reward for being a gigantic piece of shit, he is given a hot mouse love interest, who literally does not speak a single word before the end of the film, when she abruptly shows up to save his ass for no reason. Mike sings “My Way” at the end, and it’s a good rendition because MacFarlane is a good singer but I don’t want to think about Mike anymore.
• Reese Witherspoon plays Rosita, a housewife pig. She has an obscene number of children and a lazy husband (Nick Offerman), and she longs to sing away her boredom and exhaustion. She is paired with Gunter, a Sprockets-reject pig voiced by Nick Kroll (in only one of his two miscalculated comic-relief performances this year). This guy’s all over the ads, but mercifully, he isn’t given his own storyline about how, I dunno, his family was the pig version of Kraftwerk but they broke up or whatever. Anyway, Rosita dances in a supermarket once, builds a contraption to do her household routine while she’s gone, and then sings Taylor Swift.
• Taron Egerton plays Johnny, a sensitive gorilla in a family of Cockney gorilla bank robbers. His daddy is played by Peter Serafinowicz, which sounds a lot funnier than it ends up being (I had no idea Serafinowicz was in this movie until the credits). His devotion to the competition instead of getaway driving gets his daddy thrown in jail and makes him unwilling to talk to him. Oh no! Will Johnny’s triumphant performance of “I’m Still Standing” somehow make his daddy love him again? Will Edgar Wright’s movie about a music-obsessed getaway driver wash the taste of this plot out of my mouth?
• Tori Kelly plays Meena, a shy elephant. She has a great voice but can’t express it outside of her house. Her family (including Jay Pharoah and Leslie Jones) want her to do the competition, and she auditions but can’t perform. Eventually, she’s hired as a stagehand and becomes part of the show when some performers are injured in wacky ways. Will she knock the house down at the big performance? Of course she will, but that’s not as important as the fact that she oversings Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” right after the film’s second-act catastrophe, because I assume the similarly inappropriate “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On” was too expensive.

Yes, all those plots were probably on the discount shelves at Plots ‘R’ Us (and I almost forgot to mention that Buster is trying to Make His Dead Father Proud), but I can forgive blandness or predictability if any kind of spice, whether clever dialogue, fun characters, or general wit, is included. This movie is the equivalent of unseasoned mashed potatoes. For a man who’s made works of such visual wit in the past, Jennings doesn’t do anything with his unlimited palette here, except move the “camera” really fast sometimes. There are no great jokes here, no touching moments, no moments of dynamite world-building (a little detail about how fish in the movie’s universe get around is about it for that). And the voice-acting, for all the big names they got, is mostly dull and anonymous (could you tell me that Reese Witherspoon played that pig without seeing her name in the ads?). But even all that might not better if the movie delivered on its main promise; its music. And it somehow can’t even leap over that low bar it set for itself. The performances are all fine. None of them are bad, and none of the actors have bad voices, but none of them are indelible or particularly enjoyable to hear or watch. It doesn’t help that Jennings truncates literally every performance, which only undercuts any potential joy received at the big performance at the end. You can’t bask in the beauty of art if the art keeps getting cut off at the knees.

Maybe I’m being too hard on the film because I know that Jennings has done better with the exact same formula before. His last film before this one was Son of Rambow, a movie that is hardly a bastion of original plotting too. It follows the same guidelines of “let’s put on a show!” movies as Sing does; people get together to make something, they eventually fall out and everything seems lost, but then the big finale shows that their work has been worth it. And the subplots about the kids putting on the show, with one being in a strictly religious household and the other looking up to his big brother who constantly lets him down, are not that fresh either. But there, Jennings sells everything so hard because of how invested he is in making the details special. The religious mother (played by Spaced‘s Jessica Hynes) is portrayed as a sweet, sad woman locked into a situation that denies her agency, the brother is careless about how he treats his brother but not comically so (you can at least see why he would still continue to look up to his big brother), and, most important of all, the movie they make pulsates with outrageous kid energy. It goes on wild tangents and into wild scenarios, and its gaping flaws as a film are deeply moving for what they’re trying to do (this is maybe the only movie where hilariously poor looping becomes a source of poignancy). It feels, above all else, real. Sing does not feel real even within its wacky universe. Every element of it is shrinkwrapped and sprayed with disinfectant before it can accomplish anything noteworthy or interesting. It is a nothing film, one that provides no particular joy, wonder, or even entertainment for its 110 minutes despite being about the joy, wonder, and entertainment of music and theater. Its bookends are merely there to suggest the movie has a point beyond the sound of a cash register.

If you find yourself even slightly gravitating towards a theater playing Sing, fight back that urge and watch Son of Rambow instead. It’s charming, funny, and doesn’t feel like it was churned out by an android who read a Syd Field book once. Rambow takes pleasure in putting yourself out there and maybe even falling on your face while doing so. Sing is like a sports movie entirely about the joys of bunting.