Some Rodents Should Stay Retired: Chip n' Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) - Review

Disney+'s revival of the classic comedic duo is a bizarre, tactless tale that lacks any of the charm its leading chipmunks are known for.

Chip and Dale have sat comfortably just outside of Disney's Fab Five for the better part of 80 years, never upstaging the mouse, but often still being leading faces within the Disney Parks and on their merchandise.

Having grown up in the early 00s, Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers was still very-much an afternoon cartoon that left its mark on my impressionable young child mind, even 10+ years on from its original run. As such, when it was announced that Disney were reviving the beloved characters for their streaming service, I was, at the very least, intrigued. Yet now this new iteration has been thrust upon us, its impossible to draw any sort of honest connection between the film and its original source material, simply because of how utterly unhinged Rescue Rangers (2022) is.

Rescue Rangers is frankly the most insane thing Disney+ has churned out to-date. On a surface-level its meta comedy tone and can be seen to take heavy inspiration from Disney classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, yet that is quite frankly the point to which any commendable similarities can be drawn. While Roger Rabbit pioneered in 2D and live-action blending technologies, Rescue Rangers cant even get that right. The life and soul of classic Disney animation is sucked out by poorly rendered 3D models made to look 2D. The film's use of CGI technology isn't any better, with Dale's updated post-"surgery" model rather forgetful. The only ways in which Rescue Rangers technologically makes any sort of lasting impact is through its use of Claymation and occasional puppeteering, which regrettably, lacks the screen-time to showcase any real potential.

Beyond its broad scope of mediocre animation, Rescue Rangers is headed by poor voice performances from its two leads, despite both John Mulaney (Chip) and Andy Samburg (Dale) being such titans of the comedic voice acting scene. Mulaney and Samburg offer no true character to their performances, and it begs the question why Disney bothered to tie famous names to the two chipmunks in the first place. Despite playing such energetic, feisty, and more importantly, iconic rodents, Mulaney and Samburg don’t bring any of this to Chip and Dale. The two actor-comedians play nothing more than themselves, and it just doesn’t work.

Live-action meta adaptations of cartoons can work, it has done a number of times in the past. However, Rescue Rangers unfortunately fails to embrace its source material the same way the likes of Loony Tunes: Back in Action or James Gunn’s Scooby Doo movies do, and instead focuses on its throwaway gags and cameos rather than its story. You know attention has been wrongly diverted when the reject original CGI design for Sonic the Hedgehog has more personality than the actual Rescue Rangers (Chip and Dale included).

It’s a shame, as there is some genuinely good jokes in there, and a heap of potential should it have been more focused on the pre-existing history of its characters and the opportunity for comedy that those have, rather than its forgettable new original ones.

Speaking of misfiring comedy, one final point worth highlighting is how in poor taste one of Rescue Ranger’s core plot points is. The film’s lead villain, Sweet Pete (voiced by Seth Rogan), an aggressive, beer-bellied, brutish version of Peter Pan that is so incredibly offensive to the painful legacy of exploited and abandoned child actor and the original Pan, Bobby Driscoll that it is baffling how Disney thought him to be an appropriate character in the first place.

In short Rescue Rangers tries hard to capture the meta comedy that the likes of Bank In Action did a decade ago, without any of the charm. It tries too hard to be 'edgy' in its humour that it winds up offensive and difficult to watch without cringing if you are even mildly aware of the Walt Disney Studio's darker history.