Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022)

Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers arrives thirty years after its source cartoon left the air, and it carries itself like a man who has been through some things. The premise is an act of devotion to Who Framed Roger Rabbit: humans and toons share Los Angeles, the missing-persons case involves bootlegging, and the jokes come fast enough to paper over the melancholy. Akiva Schaffer and his writers have built a machine for nostalgia, and the machine works. What the film declines to do is sermonize.

The cast is diverse in the casual manner of a modern studio production. KiKi Layne anchors a substantial live-action role as a rookie officer, and Keegan-Michael Key, Dennis Haysbert, and Da'Vone McDonald fill out the voice ranks. None of it is announced. The film never asks us to notice, and it never asks us to think about race at all, which keeps that register quiet. Layne's character does get a functional arc. She defeats a corrupt captain and opens her own detective agency. It is a beat, not a thesis. Gadget returns as an inventor, married to a fly, and the film treats the arrangement as a gag about hybrid children.

The villain traffics in discarded performers, a toon actor fired for aging, and the bootlegging empire gestures at how the entertainment industry throws away its own. The film frames all of it as ordinary criminality, the way a mystery needs a culprit, so the systemic reading stays available and unclaimed. Dale's CGI surgery and Sweet Pete's bitterness about his face amount to plastic-surgery jokes. There is no climate theme, no neurodivergent thread, no reinterpretation of history, and no romance of any orientation. The enterprise runs on gags instead of sermons, which is its saving grace. It is a pleasant, joke-dense romp with almost no interest in instructing anyone. We score it accordingly and move on to the next screening.