The Mitchells vs The Machines (2021)

I know sometimes I ask “how did this movie get made?!” because, occasionally, some movies absolutely should not get made.
But this is at the other end of the spectrum. This is a movie that needed to get made, and I’m so glad they did!
“The Mitchells v.s The Machines” (2021) is a standalone movie: no sequel, prequel, existing media universe, or toy merchandizing line, which in and of itself, is an incredible feat for a family movie to overcome to get made.
Even the Lego movies – produced by the same comedic-genius duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller – had decades of Lego history to draw in audiences with.
But this, this was a masterpiece entirely of its own creation and deserving of its own accolades, and made by Sony Studios, which made the equally-awesome “SpiderMan: Into the Spider-Verse” (2018).

The base plot was pretty generic: Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) was a quirky oddball who wasn’t understood by her small-town family and wanted nothing more than to go to the big city for college and find others like her.
Her dad, Rick (Danny McBride), seemed to be actively making decisions to alienate his daughter in vain attempts to get closer to her, which left mom Linda (Maya Rudolph) and dinosaur-obsessed brother Aaron (Michael Rianda) stuck somewhere in the middle, trying to keep the peace.

Rick cancelled Katie’s plane tickets to film school so they could drive there as a family, in a last-ditch effort for some bonding time, of which Katie was immediately not happy about.
Understandable, as Rick had constantly shown he couldn’t connect with her despite his best efforts, and Katie was in equally-constant communication with other inbound freshman and was already feeling the pull of finally finding a social crowd with whom she could bond.

Meanwhile, Mark (Eric Andre), tech-genius-billionaire-millennial-idiot and founder of “Pal,” was in the process of unwittingly starting the robot apocalypse.
“Pal” was both the name of the company and the name of the Siri-adjacent AI assistant packed into every Pal Phone.
Initially the Pal company (mostly) seemed to be a stand-in for Apple, with Mark as a more-human version of Mark Zuckerberg, but it was quickly revealed that Pal was actually an amalgamation of Apple, Samsung, Google, Facebook, and a few others. This wouldn’t have been that big of a deal contextually if Sony Studios hadn’t arbitrarily decided which companies and products would get shout-outs and which ones wouldn’t. “Best Buy” was replaced by “Good Get” while YouTube was identified by name, Pal phones were as ubiquitous as iPhones, while Furbies not only got named, but a full five-minute sequence on screen, and multiple IRL movies were referenced by the cast.
As this was both animated and a family movie, I’m not going to nit-pick it as a problem, it was just a weird choice.

As to be expected from an American family movie, the Mitchell’s managed to defeat Mark’s accidental robot apocalypse, doing so somewhere between ‘blundering accident’ and ‘actual attempt,’ during which the family came together and got closer, especially with Katie and Rick managing to put aside some of their differences and bond.

The entire movie was a combination of CGI and hand-drawn animation (mostly CGI though), so I can’t/won’t comment on the quality of the graphics – they were good and didn’t distract from the way the story was being told.

The soundtrack – while good – was a bonkers mishmash of music from the first decade of this century, referencing everything from “Numa Numa” (from Romania) and Nyan Cat (from the internet) to “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” (from “Kill Bill” (2003)) and "Hoppípolla" (by Sigur Rós). I have to assume that all of them are either royalty-free pieces or stuff that the Sony record label has the rights to; while they’re definitely pieces that the adults in the audience would recognize and appreciate, it was an eclectic collection that didn’t necessarily fit.

So here’s the kicker, and why I’m reviewing this in the first place: this movie was hilarious.
There were points where I had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard.
Two broken robots, Eric (Beck Bennet) and Deborahbot 5000 (Fred Armisen) did much of the heavy lifting, as they constantly tried to convince everyone that they were humans, despite their very metallic figures and shiny black faceplates.
The Mitchell family had their own bits too, with everything from snide remarks to funny asides to their facial expressions, making them all very sympathetic characters.
And then there were the Furbies.
I had a Furby waaaaay back in the yester-year of 2000, and I remember it being weird even then. Lord and Miller took it a step farther, with a Furby army not just being creepy, but straight-up malicious. It never got into ‘scary’ territory, or tread close, but they managed to put those bizarre little toys on screen in a way that was a reminder of why society decided they didn’t need to exist anymore.
We also watched a company of Roombas fall down an escalator. I realize that sentence isn’t funny, but contextually it was.

Nothing about this movie needs a silver screen to work, but it 100% earned it’s 5-Claw rating for being the funniest movie I’ve seen in years.
It’s on Netflix, and it’s absolutely worth your time to watch it. Go. Now. Laugh and thank me later.