94 min | PG | July 15, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
A dog named Hank wants to be a samurai in a village of cats who despise dogs. It is Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles redrawn as a kids cartoon, gags and all. The premise survives the journey. The jokes do not.
Hank is a dog who wants to be a samurai in a world of cats who hate dogs. The village of Kakamucho needs a hero. The villainous Ika Chu schemes to flatten the town and impress the Shogun, so he installs Hank as the new samurai expecting the cats to destroy him. This is Blazing Saddles with fur. The film does not adapt Mel Brooks so much as photocopy him, swapping the frontier town for a feudal cat village and the racial outsider for a dog among cats.
Michael Cera voices Hank with the nervous decency that is his entire register. He plays the underdog without ever finding a second gear. Samuel L. Jackson voices Jimbo, the drunk former samurai who trains Hank, and Jackson coasts on his own cadence rather than building a character. Ricky Gervais voices Ika Chu as a preening bureaucrat obsessed with cleanliness, and his fussy contempt is the closest the film comes to a real comic engine. Mel Brooks voices the Shogun and casts himself as a benediction over a film built from his own leftovers.
Directors Rob Minkoff, Mark Koetsier, and Chris Bailey stage the action in flat, brightly lit compositions that never use the samurai setting for anything beyond decoration. The writers Ed Stone and Nate Hopper graft a 1974 script onto 2022 animation, and the joins show. The film keeps stopping to wink at the camera about its own premise, with characters announcing that the violence is too much for a kids movie. That meta gag lands once and then repeats until it curdles. The character designs are generic and the village geography stays vague, so the climactic battle reads as motion without stakes.
The film cannot decide who it is for. The gross-out gags and recycled adult wordplay sail over children, and the toothless animation bores adults who remember the source. Brooks built Blazing Saddles to detonate American racism with real shock. This version sands that down into a lesson about prejudice that a cat can deliver between sight gags. The result is a tribute that mistakes reference for comedy and ends up neither dangerous nor funny.