Abominable (2019)

You know what’s not fun? Not being the target audience for a movie.
You know what’s even less fun? Knowing I still wouldn’t recommend the movie to someone from the target audience.

I get it: not all movies are made for adults, especially if they come from Disney or DreamWorks, but that doesn’t mean they’re can’t be enjoyed by all ages. “The Lion King” (1992), “Shrek” (2001), “Frozen” (2013), and “Klaus” (2019) are all proof that a movie aimed at kids can be equally enjoyable for the adults in the audience.
And, frankly, it does seem like it would be in the studio’s best interests to keep the adults interested too. What better way to get grudging tolerance for the Nth rewatch than for there to be something that the parents can enjoy?

So it’s with that in mind that I have to say “Abominable” (2019) is both the title and a fitting adjective.

Let’s start here: while this movie was “made” by DreamWorks, it was clearly more “made” by a Chinese company called Pearl. As the animation style and script quality had approximately nothing in common with any of the other movies made by DreamWorks, I don’t think they were actually involved in the production at all, and instead acted as some kind of publisher, giving a Chinese studio an easy way to wriggle into American theaters.
This was particularly frustrating as the villain of the movie was clearly an American (based on accent), working for a not-quite-blatantly-evil company run by another American... or a Brit, depending on which accent they picked for which sentence.
I don’t have a problem of it’s an American movie where Americans are both the bad guys and the good guys, and it’s a pretty obvious option for a foreign person (Russian, Nazi, North Korean) to be the bad guy, but it’s pretty distasteful for an American studio to release this particular character dynamic as a kids movie on behalf of a Chinese studio in what was quite clearly an attempt at spinning a specific socio-political narrative.

The premise of the plot was that a Yeti had been captured from the mountains of Tibet, brought to Shanghai (Beijing?), and was to be revealed to the world at some later date. The CEO of the company apparently wanted to prove that he wasn’t pants-on-head crazy for believing in them, but instead of immediately taking the captured beast to the Nobel Institute or some such for every scientist on earth to look at, he kept it sequestered away in a research compound, for some reason.
So a plot device happened and the Yeti escaped, ended up in Shanghai proper, befriended sad girl Yi (Chloe Bennett). Yi played hopscotch through plot holes and took two cousins with her to return Yeti to Mt. Everest. Hooray.

Reminder: IRL China and Tibet are on some seriously not-good terms, so playing this up as some “lets pretend everything is sunshine and rainbows to cross the border” was pretty insincere. There’s a reason that Disney hasn’t made a movie where an upbeat Syrian Kurd decides to tour Turkey and southern Iraq.

When Yi found Yeti on the roof of her apartment building, she was immediately able to communicate with it.
No dialog - that would be stupid.
She was some kind of Doolittle, obviously.
She would watch Yeti staring at an object, then instantly “know” what it was thinking. The only way she knew to take Yeti back to Everest was because it stared at a picture of the mountain for a couple seconds. If it had stared at one of the weirdly out-of-place product placement signs for McDonald’s, I wonder if she would have tried to take it to the nearest restaurant.
Later on, Yi tried to determine how old Yeti was, pondering that it was a child of its species, so she placed three rocks in front of it and said “that’s you and your parents,” which was apparently a sentence that translated perfectly between human and Yeti-grunt, because Yeti then grabbed the rocks and hugged them and made sad sounds, which confirmed Yi’s argument, because of course it did.

This movie also hit all of the painfully stale, overused, outdated tropes that even DreamWorks has given up on: slow motion running/yelling, someone saying “save yourself” and “tell X I love them” for a completely non-lethal scenario, fart jokes, pee jokes, references to ten-year-old songs, and kids making “brave” choices that should have gotten them killed.

To add to that list, here’s a few more that aren’t quite as burned out: Yi applied the most basic of medical attention to the wild beast which made it spontaneously trust her; and Yeti, which has ‘real-life’ lore of being a primate off-shoot, behaved like an impossibly smart dog, like if you dropped Scooby Doo on his head when he was a puppy.

Yeti was “in touch with nature” and thus had a random set of powers. In seven different instances, the Yeti would start to hum, then whatever needed to happen would happen, thanks to nature, of course.
Call down lightning bolts? Nature.
Make giant blueberries? Nature.
Fix a broken violin? Nature.
It was the ultimate Deus Ex Machina tool. No problem was so big that Yeti humming couldn’t solve it.

Initially the CEO of the company seemed to be the bad guy, while his British scientist was trying to find a way to humanely recapture the Yeti.
Plot twist: the villain was actually the scientist who was actually an American who wanted to sell the Yeti for parts(?), and the CEO was just a semi-lucid old coot being taken for a ride.
Did I see the twist coming? No.
Did I care? Also no.

Of all the characters, the only one I ended up liking was the CEO. He had one funny joke.
That’s it, that’s all it took for me to like one character over the others in this dumpster fire, one funny joke; that’s how bland and boring and uninteresting the script of this was.

Somehow, this movie got the music wrong too. I’ve heard some beautiful music from China, played on a menagerie of stringed instruments; I know that, as a country, they have a rich musical history to draw from.
Which is why this movie used one American pop song and one Chinese-sounding violin piece for about six measures, repeatedly.
Ugh.
They could have at least put in a decent soundtrack.

And the CGI was terrible to boot.
It surpassed the digital beauty of the original “Veggie Tales” from back when the mouths didn’t move quite right and the round tomato had an unfortunate number of flat edges, but not by much.
I’ve seen what vanilla DreamWorks can do, and Disney, and Illumination Studios. All of them have it nailed down. Even that random Brazilian studio that made “Klaus” got it right. I have no idea how a modern studio could do so poorly, or why DreamWorks would willingly dilute their brand by releasing this soggy clump of lawn clippings under their corporate banner.
I mean, I know the reason - it’s money - but I can’t imagine it was really worth it. It certainly didn’t incentivize me to see any DreamWorks/3rd-Party joint ventures in the future.

This movie was just stale tropes and paint-by-numbers plot points.
It’s not so much that it was bad as it was just aggressively uninteresting and unimpressive.

I could, potentially, see myself letting a future Little Claw watch this on a plane during a Trans-Atlantic flight, but only if it included in the plane’s media kit and because that Little Claw wanted to see something new and I were dead-beat exhausted.
If you’re over 8, don’t watch this.
If you have someone under 8, strongly reconsider letting them watch this.