50. Spirit Untamed
There is one good scene in this film and it’s when Snips, the little brother of a side-character named Abigail, is trying to sell the main character, Lucky, a donkey ride on his silly, dinky little donkey like a taxi for a penny. Then Abigail rides in and hogties him and leaves him in the middle of the road. She does it again in the middle of the movie but this time hangs him upside down inside a barn tied to his donkey. It was an amusing thing to witness in a film that’s extremely bereft of anything resembling excitement or fun.
Nothing happens in this movie.
I'd have called it an exaggeration to say that movies could exist where nothing happens in them before I experienced one that does. I'm a believer now.
This was an incredibly boring experience. I almost fell asleep twice watching this inane garbage. I didn’t even know Spirit: Stallion of the Semeron had a sequel until I saw this film on the Dreamworks Animation Productions list as I was making my way through all of their projects. Initially, I was worried that it was going to do something to make me unequivocally hate it for ruining the first film. However, this film is too cowardly and has precisely nothing to say. It couldn’t even dream of leaving such a lasting impression as ruination.
The original Spirit is a phenomenal film that manages to create a beautiful atmosphere with breathtaking animation to illustrate the simple story of a gallant and brave horse trying to escape the bonds of humanity so that he can return to the wild with his family.
I’m grateful this film didn’t have a hand in tarnishing the memory of that previous movie but I also find myself regretting that its inaction has left me with so little to talk about. It’s just an alleged movie about everyone being absolutely right about a disruptive, accident prone little girl until the end of the film where she is apologized to for going on an insane trip to rescue some horses from the world’s most boring horse wrangler villain in existence.
Her name is Lucky (Isabela Merced). She’s a spunky young girl who, as a baby, really liked strawberries. I’m relaying this information to you because I’m certain the film really wants to make sure you know this. As unsubtle as it is, the film begins on a bit of a somber note where she as a baby and her dad are watching her mom perform dangerous tricks on a horse. It’s extremely hard to tell what happened exactly but the clear implication is that she messed up and died in the middle of the show.
Years later, she’s living in a mansion with her grandfather who's running for governor. She lets a squirrel into the room and chases it around the mansion and it lands on his face while he has guests over and that causes a huge scandal in the newspaper.
The mansion is also destroyed and the table catches fire.
Despite the film doing everything in its power to convince you that she’s the put upon, misunderstood person here, it’s hard to get that impression when the things she’s done are so outlandish. She gets sent away with her aunt after this and it’s hard to blame the governor for doing so. Of course, you might also find yourself worrying for the aunt because Lucky also, apparently, sunk her aunt’s entire summer home under water.
What does any of this have to do with Spirit? Virtually nothing aside from a single scene where she sees Spirit running outside the back of the train on her way there. The first film was a mostly silent movie because the horse couldn’t speak. There was occasional narration of his thoughts for instances that required it and, eventually, when more human characters entered the story they spoke as well. However, it wasn’t a requirement and it made for a more interesting film sometimes.
This film is not about Spirit. It’s about this little girl. It’s hard to take that at face value when despite being so destructive and terrible, she’s also extremely uninteresting. The earlier scene with the squirrel, despite being a heinous disaster, was something that felt more like happenstance rather than anything she directly caused. That’s most likely why her name is Lucky. It’s an attempt at being ironic. Realistically, it feels like a confused decision. She sometimes does things that would be considered insane and destructive but at the same time is also just accident prone?
It feels as though the film can’t decide if her disasters are her fault or a result of universal bad luck. Either one would have been fine if, whenever she’s not doing these acts of mayhem, she weren’t such a generic, uninteresting title character. Any hints towards her causing more trouble down the line are wiped from the film and forgotten the instant the plot gets going.
Her earlier traits feel as though they were plugged in there at the start to give off the quick illusion that she’s quirky so that the audience could maybe, perhaps, identify with her or at least think she’s somewhat interesting. In the end it felt more like an excuse to just say they put in the work so that they could make her incredibly bland for the entire rest of the movie. It was too much work writing an interesting personality for the entire film I imagine.
This movie has a plot that feels like it was taken from a plot generator you’d find online. The horses get kidnapped by an evil, horse wrangling cowboy and it’s up to Lucky to save them. She gathers her friends and they go through a canyon to reach a dock where the horses are being led onto a ship and then set them free.
The obstacles they face are a long gap they need to jump over and another long gap that has a skinny pathway they need to carefully walk along.
Those are the only two obstacles they overcome before they reach their destination.
Then suddenly we've reached the finale.
Boy howdy, what a journey that was.
Remember when we jumped over that gap and then walked along a skinny pathway? I hope so because those are the only things that happened. What's that? You were asleep? Ah shit. You missed the movie then.
You’ll probably question the logistics of that considering this is a feature length film and not a twenty minute pilot on Youtube. The movie isn’t concerned with that. It simply stretches out the length of time it takes to focus on these situations to accommodate for that. On top of that, it’s not what the majority of the film focuses on.
Perhaps more trials and tribulations could have been experienced had the plot kicked off faster but it takes about a third of the film’s runtime before the adventure these girls go on even kicks off. Lucky spends most of the time in the first third just trying to feed Spirit apples and getting along with her two friends, Abigail and another girl whose name they only say once.
Spirit is here too. Yes, remember him? Once again, he’s here but because there’s way more humans this time and he’s not the main character anymore there is no need to insert any of his narration. Despite how long it takes for the plot to get going, he ends up taking a liking to Lucky way faster than he did the other, more charming individual from the first film. That didn’t happen until the very end but here they need to get along quicker so that she can help save his family faster. If the two of them have as little conflict with one another as possible, the main plot can be allowed to limp along without anything thought provoking or challenging happening. It sounds riveting doesn’t it?
When they’re saved, the horses ride off and we’re right back where we started with Spirit. It’s nice nothing changed with him and I’m glad the film didn’t ruin his happy ending from the first. This was just a random thing that happened in his life, I suppose.
Legitimately, I would have been so pissed if they went the way I thought they were where he decides to stay with Lucky. I would have invented a negative number on this list and claimed that spot number 50 was a black hole that this movie fell in to reach it.
Lucky, the real titular character, doesn’t really learn anything or change either. She goes off on this extremely dangerous, and yet simultaneously extremely boring, journey to save some horses from indistinct bad guys and learns that she was right all along to be as destructive and as reckless as she is. The tension between her and her father, who she’s sent home to for the duration of this film, comes from the fact that he doesn’t like horses and thinks they’re dangerous because her mom died performing dangerous stunts on horses.
Her mom used to do backflips off of horses with her eyes closed. The fact that she died from that is the fault of the horses, according to her father.
Granted, Lucky only left without telling him because of the tension between them but even if there weren’t any, no self-respecting parent would ever let their kid do this anyway. It doesn't matter if he hates horses.
Plus, the first time she rode Spirit she almost fell off a cliff and died. It felt as though the film was attempting to tell us he initially had a point but considering she’s supposed to be in the right, I suppose not.
Is it trying to provide a message to us about trying to save the horses? Does it wish to do so by saying that allowing your daughter near them will accomplish this? I suppose having the main character’s mother’s backstory be that she died from performing backflips off of horses muddies the waters a bit on that message then. It’s better that she nearly falls down a huge canyon or gets killed by poachers.
This is a film that while describing it I fear I may be doing a service to it by explaining the plot. It risks creating the illusion that there were indeed things of significance that took place during the viewing. I cannot stress enough how much this wasn’t the case. I’ve gotten more enjoyment out of watching someone sit in a chair and inflate a balloon. This kind of film has been written so often that it has about as much substance as the air that fills those balloons too.
I was almost put to sleep by this film and if a good night’s sleep is what you’re looking for then I’d recommend the Youtube app on your phone.
Holy shit, I'm about to post this on Inkbunny and I just looked this next bit up. This film actually came out in theaters. A budget of 30 Million and a gross of 42.7 Million. It was a box-office failure and is simultaneously both Dreamworks' cheapest film and lowest grossing film to date.
No wonder you've never heard of it before. Neither did I. Let's keep it that way shall we? It is, in my opinion, their worst film.
So far.
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Well, we've made it through the middle and bottom tier. Tomorrow, the Top Tier begins. We'll be starting from #24 and going all the way to the #1 film. Get ready for some good shit.
