The third Trolls film is 91 minutes of boy band jokes for the parents and colour for the children, made with real care in the textures and much less in the story. Small children will be happy; nobody else will remember it by Tuesday.
Walt Dohrn’s third Trolls film opens at a wedding and gets to its business inside ten minutes. Branch (Justin Timberlake), the grumpy one, turns out to have been the baby of a boy band called BroZone, with four older brothers he has not spoken to since it split. One of them, John Dory (Eric André), crashes the ceremony to announce that another, Floyd (Troye Sivan), has been kidnapped by a pair of pop-star siblings who are draining his talent to cover for their own lack of it. The cure is the brothers singing together in perfect harmony, so Branch and Poppy (Anna Kendrick) set off to collect them. That is the film, and Elizabeth Tippet’s script does not pretend it is more.
It is a pleasant 91 minutes and it is thin, and we say both plainly. The good jokes are nearly all about boy bands: the matching outfits, the choreography, the brother who is the heartthrob and the brother who is the sensitive one, the reunion nobody wants to be the first to suggest. Timberlake knows this material from the inside and plays Branch’s embarrassment about his past with a lightness the character has not had before. We laughed, properly and against our better judgement, at the brothers’ first routine together, where the film runs through every nineties boy band move in turn, the slow head turn, the hand pressed to the heart, the drop to one knee. Then it asked us to worry about Floyd in his bottle, and we found we had nothing left over for him.
Ruben Perez’s design is the film’s real asset. Trolls have always looked as if they were made from the contents of a primary school craft cupboard, felt and pipe cleaners and glitter glue, and the new places keep that up, down to a village laid out on a miniature golf course. The villains’ world is the opposite: hard, shiny plastic in the colours of a sports drink, with nothing in it you could pick up. Twice the film changes style altogether, once into flat cut-paper shapes and once into something closer to the inside of a lava lamp, and both times we sat up. They are the passages we remember.
The villains are the weak spot. Velvet and Veneer, voiced by Amy Schumer and Andrew Rannells, are a brother and sister who would rather steal a voice than learn to use their own, and the idea is a decent one for a film about manufactured pop. Rannells gets some nervous, wanting-to-be-liked comedy out of Veneer. Velvet is written loud and only loud, and Schumer has nowhere to take her. Zosia Mamet, as their assistant Crimp, has the best-timed misery in the film. Of the brothers, Daveed Diggs’s Spruce and Kid Cudi’s Clay each arrive with one trait and leave with it. Camila Cabello turns up midway as Viva, whom we will leave you to meet, and Zooey Deschanel’s Bridget has her wedding and not much after it.
Nick Fletcher cuts the whole thing as if the children might leave the cinema. Few shots last longer than a few seconds and a song arrives every few minutes, whether or not the scene needed one. Theodore Shapiro is credited with the music, and we would struggle to hum a bar of his score, because the film hands nearly every moment to a pop song instead. The new song from Timberlake’s old band is placed near the end and it is fine. The reviews so far are split almost evenly between warm and weary, and we are in the middle with them.
Against the series’ own record this is the slightest. The first film had one rescue and one real thought about where happiness comes from. The second had an argument about music that it did not finish. This one has a joke where a story should be, and the joke is aimed a good twenty years above the heads of the audience the certificate is for. We were never annoyed, exactly. We were waiting, and the film kept handing us something shiny to wait with.
Take children under eight and they will have a lovely time; the felt and the glitter and the songs are made for them with real skill. If you are older than that, the boy band gags will carry you for about half the running time, and then it is down to how much you like the colour orange. It is over quickly, which for a film this busy is a kindness.
