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'Bolt' pleasant film, but not a classic
Movie Review: Bolt
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
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PLAY OFFICIAL TRAILER
out of 4 stars.
Like Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man and other human superheroes, Bolt uses his extraordinary powers to chomp evil. He’s super fast, super strong and super loyal to Penny, the girl whose brilliant scientist dad altered the previously normal white puppy she’d adopted from the Silver Lake Animal Rescue shelter, transforming him into Bolt the super dog.
Bolt and Penny are forever plagued by the incessantly plotting, cat-loving Dr. Calico. But the unexpected, incredible journey the dog embarks upon in the computer-animated, 3-D Bolt, is more hazardous than any challenge from Dr. Calico and his henchmen.
Bolt, who co-stars with Penny in the Bolt TV series, is the ultimate method actor. The series’ director and crew take extreme measures to ensure that the dog doesn’t know that his and Penny’s action-adventures are staged events for a TV show.
“If the dog believes it, the audience believes it,” the director insists.
Bolt really believes he’s a super dog, but Penny isn’t so sold on her director’s high concept. “He never gets to be a real dog,” she laments.
Bolt gets his chance to be real when he escapes from his studio trailer, knocks himself unconscious and is accidentally shipped from a Hollywood back lot to New York City. The dog who believes he’s omnipotent is in for a rude awakening.
John Travolta provides a voice for the earnest and true Bolt. The actor effectively takes his canine character on a life-changing journey in which the dog discovers the real world and his real strength.
There’s also Bolt’s visual, computer-animated performance. He’s a small, white canine who, though 5-years-old when most of the story takes place, retains his puppy cuteness. Computer-animation technique gives Bolt’s large black nose rich texture and enough expressive possibilities to get the job done.
Miley Cyrus, the 26-year-old singer-actress and star of the Disney Channel series, Hannah Montana, gives a good-natured voice performance as Penny. More often than not, Penny’s out of the picture while Travolta’s Bolt shares scenes with his cross-country traveling companions, Rhino the hamster and the reluctant Mittens the cat.
Mittens and Rhino have vastly different world views. Having survived the streets of New York City, the cynical but practical cat (Susie Essman from HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm) is a tough kitty. Quite the contrary, Rhino, a super-enthusiastic Bolt fan, is blown away by the simple presence of his TV hero.
The initially combative Mittens and Bolt predictably become pals, each willing to help the other out of dangerous spots. Try though they do, their scenes never reach the dramatic depths seen in Disney’s hand-drawn animated classics from decades past. And Mittens and Rhino, essential though they are to Bolt’s journey home to Penny, drop raggedly from the story’s radar.
There’s also a heavy-handed message that contrasts East and West Coast superficiality with heartland wisdom. Nor is Bolt in the same league with the recent run of computer-animated masterpieces from Pixar Animation Studios. It’s still a pleasant little movie, with a fiercely devoted little hero.
