This is not the first spinoff feature from the long-running, immensely popular animated children’s TV show, and you can bet the biscuit in your lunch bag it won’t be the last. That said, there must be some limit to how much content you can generate from the franchise’s core formula, which always finds the titular pack of talking puppy heroes saving their perpetually endangered home town, Adventure City, from an assortment of perils.
Nevertheless, there’s perhaps the tiniest little hint that the producers and director Cal Brunker are moving with the times in tiny, four-toed steps. Instead of focusing the drama around the boy dogs, like boisterous boxer Rubble and police dog Chase (who got a lot of airtime in Paw Patrol: The Movie in 2021), this one spends more time looking into the backstory of Skye, the silky cockapoo girl dog who flies a helicopter and wears a lot of pink. Sausage-shaped pack member Liberty, also coded as female, dominates the film’s B plot.
The action, if that’s not too grand a word for what happens here, gets going when antagonist Victoria Vance (Taraji P Henson) steals a magnetic crane in order to pull in a meteor from outer space. (Adults accompanying their kids might be disappointed that the script fails to tip its hat to a famous line from Breaking Bad that would work equally here: “Magnets, bitch!”). When the meteor cracks open, glowing pink-purple crystals attach themselves to the Paw Patrol pups and enhance each dog’s powers accordingly, so Skye can fly without any mechanical assistance, Chase can run at supersonic speed, Marshall the Dalmatian firehouse dog can summon balls of flame, etc. Only Liberty doesn’t have a super skill (at first), so the poor thing is compelled to stay back at base and look after the trio of even younger puppies which seems, in terms of gender roles, awfully regressive.
But then again, this contribution to the franchise is all over the place, literally, in terms of the accents. British kids will be used to hearing the British-accented voice cast speaking the pups’ lines – that ensemble has been retained again so as not to confuse the kids. Most of the other non-Paw team characters, however, are voiced by Americans such as the aforementioned Henson, as well as Kim Kardashian, returning here to be the voice of a vain poodle named Dolores. Underaged viewers probably wouldn’t care in the slightest about any of this geographical/accent confusion, but it’s distracting for pernickety viewers, especially as the rest of the movie is a snore.
• Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie is released on 13 October in UK and Irish cinemas.
