Nickelodeon's "Paw Patrol: Ready, Race, Rescue!" is as the title already gives away a little additional movie to the Paw Patrol franchise. This one here runs for 44 minutes, so basically as long as two episodes from the animated series and the director is Charles E. Bastien, while the script is by Steven Sullivan. Both are pretty experienced when it comes to filmmaking and have worked for years in the industry and maybe that is why this one did not really turn out a failure. Or at least not always and probably more thanks to the director. As you can see from my rating, I am not too fond of the outcome here. This mostly has to do with realism. I do get it it is for kids, rather small ones actually, but at least some realistic references and plot developments would have been nice. I am not even talking about the fac that dogs cannot only talk, but driver super fast cars and even succeed in aviation, that's alright, but everything related to racing was basically a mess and as the entire film is really about nothing else, that is a major disappointment. I will mention a few examples. One character gets out of the car in the middle of the race and another enters it. He knows very well about the car in theory, but despite lacking experience he immediately catches the leader easily and she was supposed to have the very best car out of everybody. Then at the end of the race they just say it is a split victory after initially declaring one character the winner. That came out of nowhere. So there will be another race and in order to make sense there (if at all), this race should have been between the two winners only (which it eventually is, but for other reasons). Still initially, everybody is invited again, which makes the first race really completely and utterly pointless. Okay now as a consequence let's not focus on said pointless race anymore. But it does not get better. Somehow we are supposed to believe now that the driver, i.e. the dog, is not even capable of managing a pretty easy parcours as if he never sat in a car before. Let's keep in mind he was faster and better than the main antagonist before that and she is a real pro. Also the rushed-in idea of him saying after the first race he will never race again felt very much for the sake of it. And then after said training, apparently he is doing great again because he is basically on par with the antagonist for almost the entire race and obviously wins it all in the end. How quickly huge gaps are closed in here makes no sense at all. And finally, the main antagonist's idea of behaving badly here is to steal the best parts of all the other cars in order to become faster herself. Okay, apparently she did not think it would be recognized, so there are no race inspectors. That is almost tolerable. But what really isn't is that the way they depicted and described her car early on, namely vastly superior, makes it really nonsense to think anything from these other cars could make her faster, especially the tyres.
The main antagonist is called Cheetah, like the predator, and clearly the name is no coincidence because it sounds so similar to "cheater" and she keeps cheating throughout the entire film with the help of her wealthy cousin. And the predator reference is also no coincidence because this film is really all about dogs vs. cats from beginning to end. With the dogs being superior. Even if the kittens surrounding Cheetah and her cousin are not evil or so, sometimes even a bit cute, they are intellectually inferior and not able to talk unlike the dogs though, who have kids voices, but yeah I mentioned above already what they are capable of. Sadly the guy in charge of the screenplay is not equally gifted because it is quite a mess. Luckily, there are other components who make up for it. The voice acting is not too bad and the animation I actually liked quite a bit, probably the best aspect of it all. And even story-wise, it was fairly entertaining at times, even if this was at least 50% because of the animation, just really the attention to detail was really bad and I am certainly not expecting something like "Rush" here. Also I found the Black kid who was initially the driver really annoying with his bright teeth blinking. It was almost likeable how we have the two bad guys copy that when one touches his moustache and the other copies the move. The voice actors here are all very young and they did fine for sure. Nothing too much to criticize here. I can see why young audiences who don't know about racing appreciate the outcome, especially because visually it is also not shabby at all. The road presentation before the final race I liked as well. Still overall, there are major weaknesses here I would say and more bad than good as a whole. So as a consequence this pretty recent release (less than 4 months old at this point) does not get me curious to check out the series it is based on anytime soon and I give it a thumbs-down. Watch something else instead.
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