The Stop Button

The Book of Life has a very nice style once the story starts. Everything looks like it’s a miniature, like Life is a CG Rankin/Bass “Animagic.” Not quite as good, but there’s a charm to it. To the style. Not to the movie. Life’s oddly and relentlessly charmless.

It begins with the first bookend device: a group of behavior disorder kids arrive late for the school trip to the museum. They bully the first tour guide, but then a smoking hot lady tour guide winks at them the right way, and they’re all entranced. Life’s not going to get better about objectification of women. It’s the plot, actually.

Christina Applegate voices the tour guide. Why? No reason. She’s not good. She doesn’t have any personality. There’s not a deep “Married With Children” cut involving her character. There is a deep Labyrinth cut, so maybe someone else dropped out or turned them down. Doesn’t matter. The bookending device is just so the behavior disorder kids can mouth off. They range in age from toddler to tween, and their character design ranges from seventies theatrical Charlie Brown doofus villains to Baby Huey in drag. Also, they’re a drag.

Then Applegate starts reading to them from the Book of Life, mentioning far more interesting stories than the one we’ll watch. I foolishly thought it would be an anthology of Mexican folk tales. Instead, it’s all about how Zoe Saldana needs to marry Diego Luna or Channing Tatum so Ron Perlman can get a job transfer.

Perlman’s Xibalba, lord of the Land of the Forgotten. His lady love is La Muerte, the lord of the Land of the Remembered. Kate del Castillo voices her. Del Castillo de facto gives the second-best performance in the film. Luna’s a great lead. When he’s talking, you forget what you’re watching and think it might actually be all right. Then Saldana shows up, and that all right gets qualified. Then Tatum shows up, and that all right becomes impossible. Tatum isn’t even particularly bad—Saldana’s worse—but he’s charmless. His character is the town hero; he’s only the town hero because he has a magic tchotchke. It makes him invincible. When it looks like Saldana is going to marry Luna because of true love and all that jazz, Tatum says he’ll abandon the town and stop protecting it unless she marries him.

Luna’s the hero of the movie, but Tatum’s a good guy. Everyone trading Saldana is a good guy. She may spout off about her independence, but she’ll always immediately relinquish it. Director Gutiérrez and co-writer Doug Langdale don’t write a character capable of withstanding a gentle breeze. They’re all so thin.

Life’s got some original songs. Luna’s okay at them, but not any good. Then again, the songs aren’t good; some are better than others. All of them, much like the film itself, are tedious.

Gutiérrez’s direction peaks at middling. There are some rather poorly directed sequences; Gutiérrez’s always in a hurry like he’s convinced there’s nothing worth seeing anywhere in the film, which is funny because the production design is far more compelling than the story. Ahren Shaw’s editing doesn’t help things.

Book of Life seems like Luna’s charm will somehow carry it, but then it doesn’t. By the third act, Luna can’t hold it up anymore, not with everyone else pounding down on it.

Life’s a long ninety-five minutes.