It should have stayed a video game: Ratchet & Clank fails to measure up to the games

0.5/5 on the Ratchet & Clank scale.

Have you ever seen a beloved program from your childhood recreated, only to become a complete sack of shit? Well, that was my experience with the new “Ratchet & Clank.”

Granted, Ratchet & Clank was a PlayStation 2 game, not a kids show, but the comparison still stands. The entire movie, I kept thinking of that awful kids show, “Littlest Pet Shop,” or the new, horrible remake of the “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” cartoon. It has the same poor animation, the same boring side characters, the same cliché jokes.

Poor Ratchet and Clank, looking on in sadness as they know in their hearts that their movie was a dud. Don’t be sad, friends, there is still hope for your new video game, available now for the PS4.

The movie was basically a glorified remake of the first game. Which makes sense; starting from the beginning is way better than going farther down the ever-confusing rabbit hole that was the last Ratchet game. Unfortunately for all us fans, it just wasn’t well executed.

Let’s tackle the first issue right away: the dialogue. In the entertainment industry, we have this term called on-the-nose dialogue. That’s where a character says exactly what they’re feeling, straight out. While this is completely normal, and frankly, healthy in real life, it makes boring movies. It’s cringe-worthy. We hear it and we know it’s bad, because we’ve seen it done better in movies time and time again. The argument that this movie was made for kids is out the window, too, because even kids see well-made movies and can tell the difference. Bottom line, we don’t want to hear Ratchet say ‘I love you’ when he could very well just express that same subtext through action. Rookie move, screenwriters T.J. Fixman, Kevin Munroe, and Gerry Swallow.

The second issue is the fact that the movie is just plain boring. Incredibly boring. At one point, I laid back my head and started thinking of other things because I didn’t want to try and keep up with the winding plot line.

And maybe that’s just me – I know I can barely pay attention in class, so it’s plausible. But if you go to see the movie (against my recommendation), I have a feeling you’ll be just as bored, lost and exasperated as me. As much as I (admittedly) didn’t think deeply about where the plot was meandering to, it still was very clear it was a hot mess. At one point I thought we were already at the climax, and it couldn’t have been more than 30 minutes in.

The final offense (and this one is the worst) is what happens to Captain Qwark at the end. His role becomes a redundancy that emulates villains in most lame kid cartoons. We loved Captain Qwark in the video games because he always stayed true to his character.

The only saving grace in this entire film was minor: The writers managed to hold on to the tone of the video games, in small ways. Every once in a while, Captain Qwark would quip a one-liner that sounded like it was straight out of the video games. Something like, “Have a Qwarktastic day!” These little drops of humor almost warmed me up to the film, until the plot took a turn for the worse in the end of the second act.

Overall, the movie was just plain bad. Don’t go see it. Rather, pull out your old PS2 and pop in Going Commando. It’ll curb any craving you have to go see the movie, and you can enjoy the characters how they should be enjoyed: as a playable game.

Advocate Staff