'The Mitchells vs. The Machines' is a winning match | movie review

A quirky less-than-perfect family finds themselves as humanity’s last hope as robots take over the world in Netflix’s new animated film The Mitchells vs. The Machines

No one is doing animation quite like Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. From the pure audacious laugh-a-minute humor of The Lego Movie or the inventiveness — and reinventive-ness — of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, the pair constantly challenges and subverts what an animated movie can be while still being completely reverent and masterful. Basically, they punch you in the face with graphics and color and then put you in a chokehold with profound explorations of real issues we find in our relationships. However, unlike some other studios *cough* Pixar *cough* The Mitchells vs. the Machines is unapologetically for kids and it’s all the better for it.

The Mitchells are your run-of-mill dysfunctional family that aspiring filmmaker Katie (Abbi Jacobson) is eager to get away from as she goes to film school across the country in California. Her mother Linda (Maya Rudolph) tries to be supportive of her dream as she tries to keep the family together, but Katie’s father Rick (Danny McBride) can never seem to get the “supportive parent” role right. The relationship between Katie and Rick is a central throughline throughout the movie that shows an understanding of the psychology between parent and child so well. McBride’s vocal acting of a father trying not to assume he’s always right is priceless.

In an effort to patch things up, he takes it upon himself to plan a cross-country journey to take Katie to school — yeah that’s going to work. However, in the middle of their travels, tech tycoon Dr. Mark Bowman (Eric Andre) mistakenly causes a robot uprising led by a Siri-like personal assistant called Pal (Olivia Colman). Finding themselves as the last humans on Earth capable of stopping the apocalypse, the family, including dinosaur-obsessed younger son Aaron (director Mike Rianda), have to work together to shut Pal down. The movie’s then set out into an action-packed, color-splashed unrolling ball of hilarity that maintains its poignancy throughout.

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Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.