[Review] Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie

The Captain Underpants books hold a dear place in my childhood heart. So when I heard that a movie was coming out, I was both excited and cautious. But I'm glad to find out that the filmmakers did a pretty swell job in bringing this iconic character to the big screen, wedgies and all.

Best friends George (Kevin Hart) and Harold (Thomas Middleditch) are elementary school pranksters and imaginative comic book artists. They're the type of kids who bonded over hearing the words "Uranus" and "gas" in science class. Anyway, their creations come to life when they hypnotize their cantankerous principal Mr. Krupp (Ed Helms) and unleash the (sort of) superhero Captain Underpants in all his stupendous, incompetent, whitey-tighty, wasteband-snapping glory. From there, they all face off against a mad scientist named Professor Poopypants (Nick Kroll)!

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, for the most part, captures the playful spirit and clever charm of Dav Pilkey's masterful source material. The jokes don't always land, and there is some padding between the laughs, but the script still has plenty of irresistible toilet humor to go around. The film is a symphony of whoopee-cushions. A stink-butt extravaganza. A diary of diarrhea. And like the books, it breaks the fourth wall quite often, even presenting its own in-movie Flip-O-Rama! sequence. The smooth 3D animation is also interjected with nifty clips of 2D doodles and sock puppets.

Captain Underpants is all about friendship, imagination, not taking things too seriously, and farts. Definitely farts. And it shouldn't be any other way. TRA-LA-LAA!

( 7.5/10 )

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