My review of the abysmal Toy Story knockoff Sneaks is Now Available for Everyone!

Enjoy!

I love going to the movies with my ten-year-old son Declan. That’s one of the main reasons I’m excited about doubling my workload here at Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas by writing up two new movies a weekend instead of just one.

Declan is like me. He isn’t one of those impossibly demanding snobs who will only see a movie if it’s not terrible. He’ll see just about anything. He has excellent, precocious taste, but he’s also a ten-year-old with ADHD, so in a not entirely shocking turn of events, he sometimes gets REALLY bored watching a particularly dreadful movie and wants to leave early.

I don’t blame him. When Declan wants to leave a movie, I generally want to leave as well, but I can’t because I feel a professional obligation to watch movies to the bitter end if I’m going to write about them.

My son REALLY wanted to leave Snow White after about an hour. So did I! But I stuck it out so that I could write the most definitive pan of Snow White possible.

We had a similar experience yesterday, as the only two people watching the 2:00 p.m. Easter Sunday showing of Sneaks, an animated film about the adventures of sentient basketball shoes.

The Wedding Banquet was the only other option in this week’s poll, but when I saw that an unspeakably awful, opportunistic Toy Story rip-off was inexplicably playing theaters instead of receiving the direct-to-streaming burial it so richly deserves, I pulled an audible and offered it as an option.

Sneaks didn’t just look direct-to-streaming bad. It looked like direct-to-streaming-on-Tubi bad. I am fascinated by the preponderance of fake-looking garbage on Tubi. They obviously splurged and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the rights to hundreds of the worst, cheapest movies of all time.

Declan wanted to leave about fifteen minutes into Sneaks. I was consequently torn between my responsibilities as a parent to protect my child from horrific experiences like watching Sneaks and my responsibility as a writer to do what my paid subscribers have chosen for me to do.

I worry that one day CPS is going to show up at my door and take my son away from me because making Declan remain in the theater while I watch Snow White and Sneaks in their entirety constitutes child abuse.

I’ll be sobbing uncontrollably while they read my reviews of Snow White and Sneaks to me and ask if those sound like something any child should have to endure, let alone my flesh and blood.

Sneaks was so unwatchable that I was legitimately gobsmacked to see that it had a Rotten Tomatoes score in the forties, when I couldn’t understand why anybody would think that was anything but an abomination. It even received glowing reviews from writers I respect. That induced intense cognitive dissonance.

Taste is inherently subjective. That’s true almost all the time. The exception is Sneaks, which is objectively bad.

The latest and most dreadful Toy Story knockoff follows the poorly/cheaply animated travails of Edson (Swae Lee), a standout teen basketball player in New York.

Sneaks desperately wants to reproduce the magic of 1995’s Toy Story, the impossibly influential first feature-length computer-animated film, but it lacks a Pixar budget, script, animation, character design, world-building, and prestige. What it has in common with Pixar, however, is a mom with an enormous posterior for no damn reason at all except that the animators at the gold standard of computer animation apparently have a lot in common with Sir Mix-A-Lot and R. Crumb when it comes to admiring the female form.

Edson wins a valuable pair of sneakers: Ty (Anthony Mackie) and Maxine (Chloe Bailey), which are stolen by The Collector (Laurence Fishburne), a massive hustler with a torso that resembles three refrigerators tied together.

The Collector has a hideous dog with matching sneakers and works for The Forger, a steampunk android with shoulder pads for a torso and a face that resembles a machine used for eye exams.

The Forger belongs in a different, scarier, more adult movie. The same is true of sewer rats that are way too disturbing for a movie this silly and light.

More specifically, The Forger belongs in a dark, dystopian science fiction movie, not a children's story about anthropomorphic shoes on a hero’s journey of redemption.

The character design is simultaneously bland and ugly. The look of the anthropomorphic shoes is hideous in its simplicity. For 91 minutes, my brain stubbornly refused to accept shoes with eyes and mouths.

Footware with eyes, tongues, and teeth is a Lovecraftian nightmare rather than cute heroes for a kid’s film. David Cronenberg can’t come up with imagery half as viscerally disturbing as the sentient sneaks here.

The human characters have the mesmerizingly oversized eyes of Bratz dolls. Computer animation has advanced tremendously over the past few decades, but Sneaks drags it back to the unhappy early days of the Uncanny Valley.

As ugly and bland as the human characters are, they at least provide an occasional respite from the monotony of ugly shoes having instantly forgettable adventures across a New York seen from the worst, least flattering angle: on the ground, with New York reduced to a hazy blur.

The shoes get separated. It falls upon Ty to find his sister and save her from the malevolent forces of The Collector and The Forger with the assistance of an older black shoe voiced by Martin Lawrence.

I know of Lawrence primarily from a Saturday Night Live monologue where he explored the comic possibilities of subpar female genital hygiene. It was a performance that, honestly, felt a little out of place.

We see a different side of Lawrence here, a side that’s softer, gentler, more family-focused, and less fixated on lecturing women on the proper way to care for their lady parts.

Sneaks feels less like a real movie and more like a fake schlockfest that Tracy Jordan would appear in on 30 Rock. It’s filled with atrocious shoe-themed wordplay that earns eye rolls and groans of disgust rather than laughs.

It’s filled with product placement for Nike, Converse, and Doritos and seems to last several excruciating hours.

I grew up in the 1980s. I recognized all of the black slang in Sneaks because it’s from the Reagan era. Sneaks sets out to amuse kids and parents. It fails on both counts.

To use the vernacular, it is wack.

I couldn’t wait for Sneaks to end. I kept assuring my son that the movie had to be nearly over, that there was no way it could waste more of our time without suffering from terrible guilt. I was wrong.

Sneaks is at once full of soles, and utterly soulless.

There’s something inherently fascinating about godawful children’s movies. I often find their grating wholesomeness strangely compelling, but Sneaks’ awfulness dispirited me. It robbed me of my will to live.

I saw two very different new movies with black casts this weekend. Sinners reminded me why I fell in love with film and chose to make it my life. Sneaks made me want to leave film writing behind entirely and pursue a movie-free future.

That’s right: Sneaks was so bad that it put me off moviegoing and film criticism as a pastime/profession.

Just kidding! I love movies so much that not even Sneaks can rob me of my adoration for the greatest of all art forms.

I want to apologize to my son. Declan, you deserve better than Sneaks and Snow White, but I appreciate you suffering through these abominations for/with me.

I promise that the next time I am professionally obligated to see something that looks as bad as this, I will suffer alone.

Thanks to this uniquely ill-conceived and poorly executed nightmare, sneaker culture now has its very own The Emoji Movie.

Zero stars out of five