91 min | PG | November 17, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Branch has a secret. He used to be in a boy band with his four brothers, and now one of them needs rescuing from a pair of pop-star kidnappers. The plot is an excuse to cram a hundred songs into ninety minutes, and the movie knows it.
Poppy is a Pop Troll whose world has stayed deliberately small. Then her boyfriend Branch reveals a secret. He was once part of a boy band called BroZone with his four brothers, and the band fell apart when he was a kid. When one brother gets kidnapped by a pair of pop-star villains, Branch and Poppy set out to reunite the group and stage a rescue. The film dresses a story about a fractured family in the costume of a reunion tour, and the real subject is whether grown siblings can stop performing the roles they were assigned as children.
Justin Timberlake plays Branch as the wounded baby of the band, and the casting does the heavy lifting given Timberlake’s own boy-band history. Anna Kendrick keeps Poppy relentlessly bright, but the script sidelines her by handing the emotional spine to the brothers. Eric André plays the eldest brother John Dory as a survivalist control freak who caused the split he refuses to own. Daveed Diggs gives Spruce a softer, settled register that contrasts with John Dory’s mania. Amy Schumer and Andrew Rannells voice the villains Velvet and Veneer as preening influencers who steal talent and lip-sync the credit, and the satire of manufactured fame is the sharpest thing in the movie.
Walt Dohrn directs from a script by Elizabeth Tippet, and the film runs on speed and density rather than story. Dohrn packs every frame with felt, glitter, and scrapbook textures that make the animation look handmade up close. The needle-drops arrive every few minutes, and the editing cuts to the beat so aggressively that the songs do the work the dialogue should. Camila Cabello joins as Poppy’s long-lost sister Viva, a late addition that the film introduces and resolves too quickly to land. The production design is the star, and the screenplay knows it.
This is a competent machine built to deliver candy at a steady drip. It moves fast enough that the thinness never settles, and it leans on nostalgia for music the parents in the room will recognize. The boy-band premise gives the franchise a fresh coat of paint without changing the engine underneath. It entertains kids for an hour and a half and asks nothing of anyone, which is exactly what it sets out to do.