Spies in Disguise, Review: Walter, Pigeon and These Guys

You might say that being in disguise is an essential qualification of being spies, so why give your film an obvious title? There is a rhyme and reason. The spy in this film turns into a pigeon, no less, upon drinking a serum, invented by a teenager called Walter Beckett, and that is one hell of a disguise! Use of the plural is questionable, though, since there is only one spy in the picture, while the other guy in ‘disguise’ (changing into another man, externally) is the arch-villain, not a spy.

Washington has sent the super spy Lance Sterling to prevent the sale of highly sensitive material by a Japanese arms dealer to an unknown buyer. Sterling fights the dealer and his retinue of dozens of Yakuzas alone, without waiting for back-up, against orders. After all, he believes in flying solo. After he retrieves the briefcase from the buyer’s getaway helicopter, he returns to Washington, to a glorious reception. Vain and proud, he shows off at every step, as he enters the headquarters. And, admittedly, the agency is in awe. But, horror of horrors, the briefcase turns out to be empty! Under suspicion for selling the contents, Sterling is to be arrested, when Walter Beckett comes to his rescue.

A boy who graduated from MIT at 15, Walter is the son of a dedicated woman-cop, who gave her life trying to save people. Walter had begun to design great gadgets to help his mother perform her duties better at age 4. Although his contraptions border on the ludicrous, he almost succeeds in devising futuristic inventions every time. Not surprisingly, he is retained by the agency to work for them, and Sterling is asked to check him out. Lance and Walter are almost exact opposites. Lance is smooth, suave and debonair. Walter is … not.

At first, Sterling dismisses him as some looney prodigy, and fires him from the job. However, when Beckett attempts to introduce his newest invention of "biodynamic concealment", Sterling accidentally ingests Beckett's experimental work, and transforms into a pigeon. This happens just as the ‘eyes and ears’ section of the agency is about to arrest him, but he is able to make a getaway in a Batmobile-type car, with Walter at the wheels. The unlikely duo must now retrieve a database from Mr. Bad Guy, amusingly named Killian, and save an impending calamity and clear Sterling’s name.

Forming the basis of the film is a 2009 short film by Lucas Martell. Lucas is an animation writer/director whose award-winning short films Pigeon: Impossible and the Oceanmaker have been seen more than 15-million times online, and screened at over 350 festivals, in 57 different countries. Martell has released two award winning AR/VR games too, 57° NORTH and LASER MAZER.The 6-minute 14-second short, Pigeon: Impossible, took nearly 5 years to complete, and was a crash course on every aspect of CG production. The 104-minute version has just two things in common with the short: a character named Walter Becket and a pigeon who wreaks havoc when trapped with a host of gadgets in a brief-case. By the way, it had a beginning inspired by the ‘eye’ prologue in James Bond films, with the spy walking side-on and then suddenly turning and shooting into it.

Story for the present version is credited to Cindy Davis, whose work includes the English-language screenplay for the Oscar-winning film Spirited Away, and the Oscar-nominated Howl’s Moving Castle. Ms. Davis has written for Pixar, Working Title, Miramax, Disney, and Fox. She is a recipient of the UCLA Extension Outstanding Instructor Award in Screenwriting and contributing author to Cut to the Chase (Gotham Books/Penguin). Screenplay credits are Brad Copeland and Lloyd Taylor. Copeland wrote the 2007 hit biker comedy Wild Hogs, as well as TV shows Arrested Development, Grounded for Life, My Name Is Earl, NewsRadio and the 2017 animated film Ferdinand. Lloyd Taylor hails from the Disney Writers Program, where he worked on Race to Witch Mountain and Enchanted.

Operating on many levels, the film straddles the Bond genre, the Mission Impossible and Jason Bourne series, and a composite Disney heritage, and that is possible, as Spies in Disguise proves. You have a superspy (interestingly black) who is full of himself and his gadgets, a teenage genius who wants to call himself Hydrogen Bond, holograms, illusions and scanned and adopted personae abound, a human turns into a pigeon, retaining his mind and his ability to speak English, but unaware of his pigeon structure and characteristics as a female of the species, a pigeon called Jeff hits on him, several colourful pigeons on display, Walter offering gluten free food for pigeons, Walter not wanting to hurt even villains with his inventions, even after he is told that evil guys do not care if you are nice, a British sounding villain (who is from Kyrgyzstan, if you please), a mother who dotes on her son but would much rather he go to school than invent gadgets and gizmos.

Story artist Troy Quane says that he and animator Nick Bruno, who are both making their directorial debut and have never worked together earlier, thought the short film was a fun premise and cute, but with a full film, you have to find a bit more than that to say with it. “What would be more annoying to a spy than getting his lunch ruined? What if the spy got turned into a pigeon?” Nick told a publication, “The concept of turning the world’s greatest spy into a pigeon is a little ridiculous, but we didn’t want this to be a spoof, and there is a really important message for kids, so we wanted to feel that the movie had the legitimate grounding to it. So we played close attention to the tropes of spy movies, and when it came to science we actually were looking into the real science of it all.” Incidentally, Skyfall was their greatest focus.

Plot and treatment-wise, the film is both realistic and fantastic. Reality is projected to incredible lengths, where suspension of disbelief is tapped to the full. Using a feather from his pet pigeon to make a serum, Walter is obviously going to come up with a pigeon’s genetic make-up and a female pigeon’s at that (his pet is female). But there are a dozen other make-believes that completely defy all belief. Using the computer-generated animation format allows the directors to get away with just about anything. If Bond and Bourne and MI and Disney can do it, why can’t Sterling and Walter and Co.? The trope that a formula has been made and is ingested before an antidote has been created is too familiar to be interesting.

Voice actors Will Smith as Lance Sterling, Tom Holland as Walter Beckett, Rashida Jones as Marcy Kappel, Ben Mendelsohn as Killian, Reba McEntire as Joy Jenkins, the director of H.T.U.V.(Honor, Trust, Unity and Valor) and Sterling's superior, Rachel Brosnahan as Wendy Beckett, Walter's mother, Karen Gillan as Eyes, a specialist in spectral analysis and quantum optical thermography who is paired with Ears, DJ Khaled as Ears, a specialist in aural communications who is paired with Eyes, Masi Oka as Katsu Kimura, a Japanese arms dealer and an associate to Killian, all are up to the task. Australian Mendelsohn sounds like an Irish-English, crossover without any hint of being from Kyrgyzstan.

A word about names. Walter and Pigeon together remind us of the famed actor Walter Pidgeon, who was quite popular in the 40s and 50s, and Walter Cronkite, the TV anchor who ruled CBS during the 60s and 70s. Beckett arouses memories of the character and eponymous film. Sterling could be a way of giving it British context, what with the currency by which the £ is known. Marcy is a word that begins with M, the alphabet by which Bond’s boss is designated. And Killian…you read it! Oh, I am possibly reading too much into these monikers. Wrap time.

Early teens and early twenties, with a soft corner for animation and an imagination that’s fully fertile, Spies in Disguise is for these guys, more than anybody else. If you can relish repetitive jokes about cloaca, the idea of an ace spy laying an egg, albeit in his pigeon avatar, and an XXXXXXL sized baddie, shown as a lardy, rubbery blob, you are in for a good time.

Rating: ** ½

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A05s7OM-8Oc