Pets on a Train

I can count on one hand the number of animated kids films that I have reviewed positively in my 11 years writing for WORLD. Pets on a Train isn’t going to earn a finger—except maybe a “get this junk outta here” thumb gesture. (Is a thumb a finger?) Pray tell, why does the film industry continue to bombard children with meaningless sensory stimulation? Why do parents go along with it? At least the protagonists in A Clockwork Orange and Conspiracy Theory who were forcibly restrained to watch disturbing film clips, with their eyes clamped wide open, were adults.

In Pets on a Train, a raccoon named Falcon (voiced by Damien Ferrette) gets trapped on a train he was casing to rob of its food supply. He was planning to feed his hungry friends. Also on board are several pets and an aging police dog named Rex (Hervé Jolly), but no humans. An ursine career criminal (Frantz Confiac) with a long-standing beef against Rex plans to crash the train by remote control to kill Rex. The pets will have to work together, and Falcon will have to reckon with his own checkered past, if they are to survive.

Initially released in France this summer as Falcon Express, the film, like so many others of the genre, brings visual energy but also verbal garbage—forgive me, garbahzh. Uniformly uninspiring dialogue: half of it wordless grunts and squeals, the rest flat one-liners and missed opportunities.

“Do you know about social media?” one critter asks another.

“Yes, unfortunately.”

To be fair, the film doesn’t have much crass material: three mild expletives, no potty humor, and only a brief obsession with butts. Positive messages can be extracted: Doing something wrong (like stealing) for supposedly noble purposes often brings calamitous consequences. And a hippie rodent couple who talk big (“death is just another step in the journey”) wise up. Still, that’s nowhere near enough to change my thumb-off to a thumb-up. Unless …

Unless the film is a movie-sized mea culpa, a metaphor of contrition where the evil bear represents industry executives, the train cars are movie theaters, and the pets are young viewers. Then I applaud—with one hand.

Whatever the interpretation, older viewers will detect references to a well-known late 1980s action film. See if you know what it is: Pets on a Train takes place during the Christmas season, the bad-guy bear is named Hans, and there are two partners—black and white reporters, not FBI agents—who share the last name Johnson. And both films poke fun at TV news anchors who exploit people’s tragedies. If you said Die Hard, give yourself a prize: a ticket to any film except Pets on a Train.