Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017)

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie arrives from DreamWorks with a mandate so modest it borders on the radical: make fourth-graders laugh. Two pranksters, George and Harold, hypnotize their joyless principal into believing he is a superhero who wears his underwear on the outside, and the film spends its remaining runtime on toilets, sock puppets, and a villain named Professor Pee-Pee Diarrheastein Poopypants. There is no lesson here. There is no sermon. The picture celebrates friendship, imagination, and laughter as defenses against institutional dullness, but it does so through whoopee cushions and flipbook interludes, not through a lecture.

The voice cast offers Kevin Hart and Jordan Peele in prominent roles, giving the ensemble a Black presence that the screenplay never acknowledges. Their characters are defined by temperament, not heritage. Race does not enter the frame, and neither does anything else from the modern cultural toolkit. Edith, the shy lunch lady, drifts through as a gentle love interest with a sliver of initiative, and the film makes no argument about her place in the world. Melvin, the child prodigy who lacks the part of the brain that produces laughter, is a comic grotesque, not a portrait of neurodivergence. The toxic waste that powers the climax is a plot device, never an ecological warning.

What remains is a film almost aggressively unconcerned with the anxieties of its decade. It wants to be John Hughes for the juice-box set, and it mostly succeeds on charm. The villain's grievance is his ridiculous name, not the economic order. The underwear gags carry no message about bodies. The result is a tidy, good-natured cartoon that arouses no controversy and advances no cause. For those of us who spend our days cataloging such things, this is a restful assignment. The picture scores low, and it seems entirely at peace with that.

{"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation", "superhero"]}