Spies in Disguise

Being a spy is a dangerous game, never being sure who to trust, danger around every corner and having commit acts of malice in a crowd of enemies. But sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture, sometimes you need a… bird’s eye view

OK, it was a cheap joke but seriously, we’re looking at the last major effort of Blue-Sky Studios before it was absorbed into the House of Mouse. Blue Sky Studios is a mid-tier animation studio, most famously behind the Ice Age Films. The animation doesn’t carry the high bar of Pixar films, but bears a slightly higher prestige than say Illumination.

Anyway, Spies in disguise, based on the short film Pigeon: Impossible, though loosely from what I can tell, the film has a full-on celebrity voice cast featuring Will Smith, Tom Holland, Karen Gillen, Ben Mendelsohn and… DJ Khaled?

Anyway, the film released in December 2019 to a fairly positive reception but that didn’t translate well to money at the box office, the film received only $150m on its $100m budget. I don’t think Disney really cared whether this made money or not. Let’s dive in and see whether or not that’s a justified position.

Our main characters are charismatic super-spy Lance Sterling (Will Smith) and an outcast young scientist named Walter Beckett (Tom Holland). Walter had always been a preferer of non-lethal means of incapacitating enemies, something born of idolisation of his police-officer mother who got a bad case of the Disneys and died in the line of duty. His father will never be mentioned. Unfortunately, most of the agency is still all-for guns and explosives and so Walter is ostracised and branded as weird.

So, to have any chance of his gizmos used in the field, he has to sneak them into Lance’s equipment. He does so, but Lance was not aware, and in life-or-death scenarios that could have easily have been fatal. Beckett is fired but Lance has fallen into the classic spy-movie scenario, say it with me, he’s be a framed for a crime he didn’t commit.

Now on the run from the agency, his only hope of clearing his name may be with Beckett. But what happens when Beckett accidentally turns him into the pigeon?

So we have a buddy-cop duo of Lance and Walter. Lance is used to being badass but that element is somewhat neutralised by him being a pigeon. Still, he’s used to field operations and has tactical knowledge that’s essential to the mission. Walter has no field experience and is not a physically capable being, he is quite clever for his age and his unconventional gadgets prove to be useful in compensating for their combined lack of combat ability. There are also some comic relief pigeons.

A running theme in this is the never-ending cycle of violence being perpetuated by the agency, the bad guy in this film, Killian (Ben Mendelsohn) was a victim of one of Lance’s former raids, his penchant for explosives leaving his closest dead and himself scarred. There’s something to be said about this, sometimes violence can only be answered in kind, as it’s all the enemy respects, but misdirection, deception and non-lethal attacks can be just as devastating to an opponent than a full-frontal attack, with the added bonus that the risk to the heroes is lessened.

Walter’s gadgets are quite clever in that regard, foes can be incapacitated with ‘serious string,’ stunned with kitty glitter, rendered immobile with whatever the hell that jelly beam was, among other clever little gadgets. Of course, the most notable is bio-concealment, which disguises you by turning you into a pigeon, the one that drives the main plot of the film.

Lance’s main character weakness is that he’s not a team player. I think it’s implied he’s had partners before but they’ve been killed in action, not dissimilar to Walter’s mother. It’s that act that leads him to send Walter away for the final battle, where he’s quickly captured and Walter has to rescue him, having been saved by another of his gizmos, the inflatable hug.

OK, going off characterisation for a minute, the animation is pretty good, the action scenes look fluid and dynamic, there's a good variety of unique-looking locations, the character designs, including the pigeons are decent and there’s a few visually funny scenes… early on and there comes the problem, the premise and any comedic potential the writers could wring from it is run dry by about half-way through the film, given that there’s a significant amount of time in the first half dedicated to setting it all up, that’s not a lot of time to take full advantage.

The comic relief pigeons don’t do it for me either. They’re not minions bad but they’re pretty forgettable.

Spies in Disguise coasts along with decent voice-casting and slick animation, but falls a bit short on its comedy. Its story is far from original but has an interesting twist that offers a unique perspective, as well as keeping it family friendly. Walter and Lance make an interesting duo, though the ending scene where they both get fired only to get immediately rehired again felt entirely unnecessary.

Rating 65/100