You’ve heard this story a thousand times but we’re telling it to you again, whether you like it or not. Yes, that’s usually the sign we’re about to stumble on to one of the animated greats of the millennium when even jokingly we’re told that this story has been retreaded a thousand times. But we’re going to hear it anyway. “Gnomeo & Juliet” is a film that is marketed to someone but I’m not sure whom exactly. It’s too obscure for kids to understand, and too sugary sweet for the adult sector to enjoy.
It’s barely eighty minutes long and requires the attention span of a fruit fly, commanding no involvement in the characters or conflict, and it relies on tacky backyard props to tell a story that involves murder, suicide, and a cursed family bloodline. Walt Disney’s “Gnomeo & Juliet” is the most generic animated film of the year with color palettes and landscapes all fairly underwhelming and lacking in imagination or vivid creativity, that not even the colors are well thought out. The Montagues are a blueish green hue while the Capulets are a reddish green hue, both of whom torn apart by a feud that involves two lawns and two warring neighbors in Verona Drive, one lives in house 2B and the other in the house 2B with a “Not” sign over it.
Get it? Shakespeare is hovering, rolling, and leaping in his grave, folks. This is basically one of the most twisted tragic love stories told with garden gnomes, and lo and behold it’s about as patronizing and condescending as you can imagine. In spite of the incredible cast of individuals such as James McAvoy and Emily Blunt just to name a few in a shocking ensemble cast of seasoned British performers. The Capulet gnomes of course maintain the garden of their owner while the Montaque gnomes maintain the garden of their owners, and both families are at battle to see who can keep up the best appearance. Basically both of them claim they know how to best the other with a new flower. And when they devise ways to sabotage the other, Gnomeo and Juliet cross paths.
This whole hackneyed limp “Toy Story” rip-off continues on with a tragic romance that can stay confined to the PG rating and not depress children so much on the car trip home after that final McDonald’s meal. Performances are about as limp and bland as the atmosphere and “Gnomeo & Juliet” completely and utterly butchers a literary classic in exchange for talking down to its audience and telling a barely mature story, and it’s a waste of time even at a merciful seventy minutes. A terrible movie all around, while it doesn’t murder Shakespeare’s literary masterpiece, it really does the source material nor its audience any sort of favors. “Gnomeo & Juliet” is a bland and uninteresting reworking of a famous play that does nothing to challenge or compel its audiences in to caring for its characters, and instead just acts as a British “Toy Story” and fails big time.