Brad Bird, the Spielberg of animation, brings his masterly authorial touch to a terrific family film that retrieves the genre from the doldrums of dull, AI-formulaic stories and visuals. This animation is smart, witty, humane: a fantasy spectacular with old-fashioned entertainment values, amazing cityscape design, and a beguiling, sweet romance.
A retro-futurist noir setting
The setting is a city of marvels in a world to come, a retro-futurist urban landscape with hints of Metropolis and Blade Runner. There are plenty of regulation moving walkways, flying cars, and eerie hologram billboards, but a light touch puts the fun back into what could be cliché. Here an old-school noir thriller unfolds, with tough private detectives and bad guys wielding state-of-the-art laser-particle firearms—which explains the title. There are careworn cops, cynical club owners, and alluring shady ladies with touches of Lana Turner and Veronica Lake. The airborne automobiles have the bulbous lines of a previous century, and TV monitors show black-and-white images; plasma flatscreens have evidently been disinvented.
Ray Gunn and the femme fatale
Sam Rockwell voices Raymond Gunn, an ex-cop turned gumshoe who left the police after covering up for the misdeeds of a female detective with whom he’d been poignantly in love; his tough persona covers a gallant softie. He lives in a world of racist bigotry towards aliens, and Ray takes some heat for working with Eyera (voiced by Tom Waits), an alien who, at the end of one bruising incident, is not admitted to a humans-only hospital. Ray’s path crosses with that of sultry singing superstar Venus Nova (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), whose creepy nogoodnik fourth husband Arnold (Bobby Cannavale) is having an affair with Venus’s stand-in double; he tries using this woman to fabricate bogus evidence of an affair that would lead to a lucrative divorce. The divorce laws are a bit retro in this world as well.
When Venus discovers his planned scam, she threatens to kill Arnold in front of witnesses, creating a murderous cloud over her reputation—but malevolent Arnold has something on her too. It all leads to a scary plot involving Venus’s smoothie manager and first husband Barry (Alan Tudyk) and fez-wearing nightclub proprietor and mob boss Slugsy (Matt Berry), who comes on like a cross between Sydney Greenstreet and Jabba the Hutt.
Set pieces and themes
There are some lovely set-piece scenes—especially when Ray and Venus take to the floor at a club offering a “zero gravity” interlude allowing dancers and lovers to float surreally around as if in space. There is also a bizarre interlude when a gun turns out to be—temporarily—capable of scrambling the limbs of those in its sights. On top of all that, the film has something to say about algorithmic ads and data privacy. It’s a charming, very enjoyable movie with a big heart.
Ray Gunn screened at the London film festival; it is in Australian cinemas from 3 December, UK and US cinemas from 4 December, and on Netflix from 18 December.
