106 min | PG | October 7, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
A singing crocodile lives in the attic of a New York brownstone, and a lonely boy becomes his best friend. Javier Bardem hams it up while Shawn Mendes supplies the voice. The movie is a jukebox in a reptile costume.
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile turns Bernard Waber’s picture books into a live-action musical about a crocodile who lives in the attic of a Manhattan brownstone. Lyle does not speak. He sings, and his voice belongs to a pop star. The Primm family moves into the house and the boy, Josh, discovers the reptile hiding upstairs. What follows is a product engineered to deliver radio-ready songs at regular intervals. The film is less a story than a delivery system for its soundtrack.
Shawn Mendes voices Lyle and supplies the singing that the entire enterprise depends on. The voice is smooth and the songs are pleasant. The character has no interior life beyond the next chorus. Javier Bardem plays Hector P. Valenti, the broke showman who first finds Lyle, and he attacks the role with cape-swirling theatricality that no one else in the cast matches. Winslow Fegley plays Josh Primm as an anxious kid, and Constance Wu and Scoot McNairy play his parents with the steady patience of adults the plot needs to stay calm. Brett Gelman plays the downstairs neighbor Alistair Grumps as a one-note villain whose name tells you everything the script bothered to invent.
Will Speck and Josh Gordon direct from a script by William Davies, and they shoot the brownstone as a warm, saturated playset where every surface looks freshly painted. The CGI Lyle is the real special effect, rendered with photoreal scales and oversized cartoon eyes that telegraph emotion in close-up. The musical numbers cut on the beat and stage themselves across rooftops and subway platforms with a glossy commercial sheen. The animators give Lyle genuine weight when he moves, and the integration with the live actors holds up under scrutiny. The seams show in the writing, not the rendering.
This is a competent machine that knows exactly which buttons it intends to push. The songs land, Bardem chews the scenery, and the crocodile is hard to dislike. The film never reaches for anything past reassurance. It teaches a child that being different is fine and then wraps the lesson in the same shape every family movie uses. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile works on the audience it targets and evaporates the moment the credits roll.