All the horrible mothers who took their 10 year old kids to see Deadpool should have taken them to Teen Titans Go! To the Movies. This cinematic adaptation of a fun kids TV show goes for the superhero fart joke instead of incisive torture and ridicule like the Merc with the mouth. Teen Titans even makes fun of its main villain’s resemblance to Deadpool, that’s how much it wants to be loved and respected by superhero superfans.
The Teen Titans are DC superhero misfits: Beast Boy (Greg Cipes), Cyborg (Khary Payton), Raven (Tara Strong), Starfire (Hynden Walch), and their leader Robin (Scott Menville). Because they are misfits in a world of superheroes, movies are not made about them. Robin especially thinks the Titans need a movie, so they form a rivalry with Deadpool, er Slade Wilson (Will Arnett). Doesn’t matter. The Titans just want to combat him so they can pitch the story to Jade (Kristen Bell), superhero producer extraordinaire.
Teen Titans Go! is a PG version of Deapool, as it intends to send up the superhero genre in fun but child-focused ways. This is a very hard task, and Teen Titans succeeds in fits and starts. Fart and poop jokes show up, and they’re kinda funny, but they go on much longer than I thought they would; whatever, I get that kids will love that. That’s low hanging fruit. Something much more clever are when they really find something very superhero centric to exploit. Case in point, without our favorite superheroes having some awful tragic backstory, the bad guys would run the world, so after realizing this, the Titans over a montage simply let Bruce Wayne’s parents walk down that crime ridden alley instead of just walking half a block over. Yikes, but VERY clever. The best trick the Teen Titans have up their sleeve are song and dance numbers, of which there are many. A great deal of thought and care has been put into the lyrics, including a competitor for The LEGO Movie‘s Everything Is Awesome as one of the best mockery songs. The combination of song, sly satire, and then a pandering kid joke makes Teen Titans Go! To the Movies interest level constantly change, which ends up frustrating as more time goes on, since the story isn’t giving you anything you’re not already familiar with, so you’re just hoping the jokes are good.
The LEGO Batman Movie sort of stole some of Teen Titans Go! To the Movie’s panache. Timing just isn’t in the cards for the Titans. I don’t think they will care much though; they’re too busy laughing and dancing around and eating burritos to get truly down in the dumps. There’s a lesson in there for me somewhere; I guess I’ll head to Chipotle now…