Flasz On Film

Synopsis: Willie’s dream of fighting crime with his cop dad is shattered when his baby brother Charlie arrives. Besides stealing all the attention, Charlie turns out to have actual superpowers. 

Today’s installment of “who is this for, and why should you care?” brings us Super Charlie. Adapted from a bestselling series of children’s books written by Camilla Läckberg (for whom, by the way, this series was a refreshing departure from penning popular crime stories) and directed by Jon Holmberg, Super Charlie is a European co-production that looks and feels as though its ambition was to blend seamlessly into the mainstream of Pixar-esque animation and hopefully ensnare young audiences with a combination of its four-quadrant appeal and the cultural cache of the source material that many parents would treat their young offspring to as part of their bedtime routine. That, I suspect, was the film’s win condition: hook mums who know the brand, then dangle the promise of Pixar-level entertainment—on a fraction of the budget. 

But as I may have remarked before, most recently on the occasion of reviewing Heidi: Rescue of the Lynx, the game of approximating Pixar without having access to their funding is a fool’s errand because the quality of CGI scales with the money and time spent on its production. The more it costs, the better it looks. Without cheap labour or disruptive tech, European filmmakers can’t hope to match Disney/Pixar’s polish. And with looks comes the sense of engagement as well because if the animation looks sluggish and poorly rendered, then the action visualized using this technology will likely fall short of expectations when it comes to generating viewer immersion, suspense and exhilarating action sequences. Which is exactly what Super-Charlie does. It looks like a DreamWorks relic from twenty years ago—no amount of squinting can hide it. 

However, you might be able to counter this problem by dint of marketing the movie to audiences that are too young to care about the way animated movies look. After all, Paw Patrol and Bing pale in comparison to the big budget mainstream, which is fine because they are all aimed at viewers under five years of age. The problem with Super Charlie is that it is aimed at slightly older audiences, perhaps those who are old enough to have seen Boss Baby and The Incredibles and who will be immediately able to recognize that Super Charlie doesn’t have what it takes to rival those movies and in fact that it looks like a cheap knock-off. If you took a five-year-old, I doubt they’d have fun: the jokes would sail over their heads, the action would confuse them, and the story wouldn’t register at all. Even though Super Charlie is short enough to just get a five-year-old to sit still for its entire duration, what’s on the screen is unlikely to engage them in any meaningful way.  

It is almost as though the filmmakers didn’t think about who their target audience would likely be. It’s too much for a kid that’s young enough to engage with the characters and it will look boring and uneventful to anyone old enough to enjoy The Incredibles on Disney Plus.  

If I wanted to be funny about it, I’d openly dismiss Super Charlie using memetic means as “The Incredibles you have at home” but the problem is that many families do have The Incredibles at home already. The real deal that is. So, I don’t think I have it in me to recommend this movie to anyone thinking about spending a considerable sum of money on a cinema outing to see this when they have already paid their Disney Plus subscription for the month and can sit their eight-year-old down and have them watch The Incredibles or The Incredibles 2. In fact, while watching Super Charlie, I was quietly wishing I could watch those Pixar gems myself because what this Holmberg-directed production offered was a chore to sit through.  

Perhaps it only goes to show that knowing who you’re making a movie for and what this audience would demand should be on the minds of all filmmakers aiming to produce big screen entertainment, especially when aiming their work at younger minds. Super Charlie just fails on all counts here. It looks like a fake Pixar movie found in a bargain bin, the character of Charlie is frightening to look at even to a middle-aged man and the whole thing is undermined by a plot that is as convoluted as it is telegraphed. It is, unfortunately, a complete and utter misfire.