Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Nick Park and the Aardman Animation crew return to their most beloved characters for the first Wallace and Gromit feature in almost twenty years. Vengence Most Fowl is an improvement on their first feature-length adventure, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, because it calls back the greatest of the Wallace and Gromit short films, The Wrong Trousers (1993). That movie had one of the greatest villains of the '90s, a decade when Hollywood fully forgot how important a good villain is to action, comedy, horror, and mystery films—seriously, between Hans Gruber in 1988 and Hans Landa in 2009, there are about 11 really good bad guys. But the villainous penguin disguised as a chicken, Feathers McGraw, was a thrilling villain because he's amazingly expressive and sinister despite not really having any facial features apart from eyes. His lack of a mouth, and therefore lack of speech, made him a fantastic counterpart to the lovable Gromit.

Vengence Most Fowl shows us what happened to Feathers McGraw after the events of The Wrong Trousers. Sentenced to live and work at the Zoo, he plots his revenge Cape Fear-style. Meanwhile, Wallace's latest invention, an AI-powered garden gnome, turns out not to be the solution to the household economic issues the bumbling inventor had hoped it would be. The first twenty-five minutes of this film are pure delight. Park, co-director Merlin Crossingham, and screenwriter Mark Burton craft a number of clever gags and fill every frame with hilarious details. Unfortunately, like most movies that are essentially short films expanded to feature length, the picture drags a bit in the middle. That's surprising as, at 79 minutes, this is the shortest of the ten Aardman features.

The picture recovers nicely with the kind of spectacular action climax we've come to expect from these movies, regardless of length. No matter that the Aardman movies always come up a little short for me, I love the handmade qualities, which are especially pointed considering this story's themes. Plus, these are very enjoyable characters to spend time with, and Julian Nott's theme music always makes it seem like everything is right in the world.