Wreck-it Ralph Reviews
Top CriticDisney's found a lot to play with here, but you may find yourself itching to take the controls.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
You'll either love it or you'll admire it, while wishing it would calm down and, I don't know, maybe pick up a book for a while.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a cool game, to be sure, but watching someone else play it gets old after a while.
For anyone with a grade-schooler and a free Saturday, it's a pretty safe and painless bet. And a great excuse to go up to the attic later and see if you can dig out your old Atari 2600.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Unlike the Pixar films toward which it aspires-which marry sophisticated conceits to straightforward storylines-Wreck-It Ralph consistently gets lost in its own intricate plot mechanics.
'Wreck-it Ralph' is a serious contender for the title of best animated film of the year.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
The movie's subversive sensibility and old-school/new-school feel are a total kick.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It's impossible not to feel a strong sense of nostalgic amusement, if not sheer delight, at the comings and goings of all these characters.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's fun for awhile, but it's not a video game you'll come back to once you set down the controller.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Amid all the boring crashing and chasing and slapstick, there are some brilliant flashes of wit (particularly a reference to the guards in the Wizard of Oz).
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Emphasizes action and eye-popping visuals over emotion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
'Wreck-It Ralph' combines a fresh idea with a true love for retro pop culture. It's hard not to love this movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Delightfully off the rails, offering a grown-up-friendly tone and merging of visual styles that are reminiscent of the studio's 1988 animated homage to film noir, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit."
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Wreck-It Ralph is the latest in a rash of recent movies fired up with imaginative risk. Director Moore brings a video junkie's passion to the movie game, and it's hilariously infectious.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's a lovely pretext for dazzling visuals, yet the production is diminished by the clumsiness of an 8-bit script.
Like a video game, Rich Moore's 3-D film is colorful, noisy, and pixel-deep.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Wreck-It Ralph is pop nirvana, a headlong rush through classic arcade games and Nintendo standards that's not too busy playing spot-the-reference to keep from paying off in laughs and heart.
The movie invites a measure of cynicism - which it proceeds to obliterate with a 93-minute blast of color, noise, ingenuity and fun.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
It's pure plastic product from plot line to the pro forma 3-D to the tidy moral lessons - ersatz family entertainment as disposable as it is diverting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The farcical story is cute, the dialogue witty and the players charming.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Think "Tron" with belly laughs. Or "Night at the Museum" with any laughs.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
"Wreck-It Ralph" blends poignancy and a piston-powered plot that revels in both visual inventiveness and a vaudevillian sense of timing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Starts out as a funny high scorer but limps into a second half as flat as those quarters we once pumped into arcade machines long ago.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Wreck-It Ralph feels like so many modern AAA gaming titles-a promising starting point for an inevitable, improved sequel.
The film flies off in all sorts of directions, all of them rewarding. But the best trick is how screenwriters Phil Johnston and Jennifer Lee bring everything back together, even the seemingly least-related elements.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
The most inventive and entertaining family movie I've seen this year, packed with wickedly smart humor and joyful animation.
A gorgeously rendered story that will play just as well to children as to their parents, albeit for different reasons. Playstation and Xbox junkies will be equally pleased.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Bursting with candy-bright colors and zoomy action, Pixar's "Wreck-It Ralph" should prove as entertaining as a sugar rush for its young target audience.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The art design and color palette of "Wreck-It Ralph" permit unlimited sets, costumes and rules, giving the movie tireless originality and different behavior in every different cyber word.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Wreck-It Ralph never does anything groundbreaking with this idea, but it's cute and clever and evokes nostalgia for gamers of the '80s and '90s.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's a fine piece of moviemaking that has a little something for kids who don't remember when games were played in arcades and adults who will delight in the tweaking of a bygone era.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It doesn't quite carry the heft of Toy Story, but there's a lot of heart packed into these zeroes and ones.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
The metaphor is clever, injecting real-life risk and reward into these beautifully artificial vistas, scored to composer Henry Jackman's Nintendo-worthy beeps and bloops.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Life lessons about being true to yourself are learned along the way, delivered with all the subtlety of Felix's hammer, but Wreck-It Ralph actually makes us care about these videogame characters and their dreams.
With a mix of retro eye-candy for grown-ups and a thrilling, approachable storyline for the tykes, the film casts a wide and beguiling net.
There are a staggering number of rules governing the gameplay in Wreck-It Ralph, and one of the toon's greatest pleasures comes in how intuitively audiences discover those parameters as the story unfolds.
