95 min | PG | December 15, 2021 | Paramount+
In a world where monster wrestling is the national sport, a teenage girl trains a giant beast who would rather dance than fight. Winnie wants to revive her dead father’s gym and drag her washed-up town back to glory. The monsters are enormous. The ideas are not.
Rumble imagines a world where giant monsters are the planet’s beloved athletes and wrestling them is the national pastime. Winnie Coyle is the daughter of a legendary trainer in the rundown town of Stoker. She wants to revive her late father’s gym and put her town back on the wrestling map. She finds her champion in Steve, an enormous beast who would rather dance than fight. The film is a standard underdog sports story wearing scales and tentacles, and it follows that template down to the last beat.
Will Arnett voices Steve with the same deadpan reluctance he brings to most of his roles, playing a coward who needs to discover his confidence. Geraldine Viswanathan gives Winnie genuine drive and warmth, and she carries the emotional weight the script keeps handing her. Terry Crews voices Tentacular, the celebrity monster who abandons Stoker for a bigger market, with cartoon bluster and ego. Stephen A. Smith voices the announcer Marc Remy and essentially transplants his sports-television persona into the booth. Ben Schwartz and Tony Danza fill out the supporting roster as Jimothy Brett-Chadley III and old trainer Siggy. The voice work is capable, but the characters underneath it stay thin.
Hamish Grieve directs from a script by Matt Lieberman, adapted from Rob Harrell’s novel. The monsters arrive in bright primary colors with rubbery weight and exaggerated faces built for kids. The wrestling sequences borrow the staging and camera grammar of televised pro wrestling, complete with pyrotechnic entrances, ringside hype, and instant-replay cutaways. That borrowed presentation is the most distinctive thing the film does. The human characters and their environments stay generic by comparison. The dance-and-training montage that powers the second act repeats every sports-movie montage that came before it.
Rumble knows exactly what it is and aims squarely at young children. It hits every required mark and never reaches past them. The monster-wrestling premise promises something strange and inventive, and the execution delivers something safe and familiar. The animation is clean and the pace is brisk, but the story has nothing to say that the genre has not already said a dozen times. It is a competent assembly of parts that have all been used before.