Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)

 

Genre: Family/ Comedy

Time: 1h 41mins

Director: Sam Fell

Quick Summary: Having pulled off an escape from Tweedy's farm, Ginger has found a peaceful island sanctuary for the whole flock. But back on the mainland the whole of chicken-kind faces a new threat, and Ginger and her team decide to break in.

This is as braindead as those chickens. 

How did we come from such a masterpiece to this? It's nowhere as near as good as what we had. I am actually upset over this. They couldn't even be bothered to get voice actors that were close to the original Ginger and Rocky! Which I found to be so distracting all the way through. That feels like an insult more than anything. 

Okay, the animation is still pretty good and there are a lot more vivid colours involved this time. Stop-motion-wise, I do think it's much better than the original somehow. I don't have anything else to say about that, but it's still very much perfect.

I know I didn't like Rocky in the first film, but they really didn't need to do him dirty like they did in this. The poor guy has been reduced down to the dumb, and somehow does the right thing out of the chaos he creates, foolish himbo type. He is actually stupid in this, whereas in the last one, he still had a brain. I think I was cringing more at him than laughing. 

This brings me to the humour for this. It just wasn't funny. I'm not sure how they managed to miss the mark so much, but I think I only found 30 per cent of the film funny. The rest is watered-down, dumb, soulless jokes. Though, I did giggle a bit at Ginger when she was basically infantile. It also seems they tried to cram in Babs making a bizarre comment every five seconds, which I'm not sure if I liked or not honestly, but she definitely felt way more stupid. 

The villain wasn't much of a surprise to me, but actually, I thought it was a pretty cool callback and actually made sense. I found their new outfit to be pretty groovy too. It's simple but I bet now it will be recognisable instantly. 

For the story, it was alright. I'm not mad at it because it had a good concept. I just don't think they were able to get it forward as well as they hoped, which is mainly at fault of the comedy for me. The "chemically induced" happy chickens were a pretty interesting plot, I just wish there was more to it or we got to see it unfold a bit slower. There were a lot of callbacks to the original which was also pretty fun.

A sad attempt at a sequel that I wouldn't have cared if we never got this. Sure, it's nice that we have this now, but I would have waited a few more years for them to straighten out a few things. The ending felt very long, which made it difficult to enjoy.

3/10

"Ginger: Okay, everyone. It's go time.

Babs: It's all right. I went before we left."