Wreck-It Ralph

Rich Moore’s film starts from an idea good enough to carry a whole picture: when the arcade shuts, the characters go home. They commute between cabinets through the power strip, drawn as a railway terminus. The villains hold a support group and recite a pledge about being bad and being at peace with it. Ralph (John C. Reilly) has spent thirty years wrecking a block of flats so that Felix (Jack McBrayer) can be cheered for mending it, and he has had enough. He wants a medal. The film is good, and it is best in its first half hour.

That half hour is close to delightful. Mike Gabriel’s designs give each game its own rules of movement. In Fix-It Felix Jr. the tenants jerk about in a handful of frames and the trees are square; in Hero’s Duty, the shooter next door, everything is gunmetal and glare and the soldiers never stop barking; the station between them is a grey hall of arrivals boards and security guards. The jokes come fast and most of them land. Zangief, voiced by Moore himself, explains to the group that he crushes skulls between his thighs and is not a bad guy. We laughed a good deal, and then the film left the arcade.

It leaves for Sugar Rush, a kart-racing game built out of sweets, and it stays there for the better part of an hour. The place is pretty: forests of candy canes, a swamp of chocolate, a track of icing. It is also far less interesting than what has just been abandoned. The gags narrow to confectionery and the plot narrows to a race, and a race has one shape. Somewhere past the hour we realised we had stopped laughing and started waiting, which is not what we expected from a film that opened with a Pac-Man ghost running group therapy.

What holds it together is the pairing at its centre. Reilly plays Ralph with a heavy, tired patience, a big man who has learned to stand at the back, and he never once asks to be liked. Sarah Silverman gives Vanellope, the glitch who steals his medal, a rasp and a motormouth and no manners at all, and the two bicker like an old couple within minutes of meeting. There is a scene in which they build her a kart together and it comes out lopsided and daubed and wrong, and she is thrilled with it. It moved us more than we had bargained for, because it is the first time in thirty years Ralph has made something instead of breaking it, and Reilly plays the pride almost in silence.

The supporting voices are well chosen. Jane Lynch plays Calhoun as a drill sergeant who cannot switch off, and her stiff courtship with McBrayer’s Felix is the film’s second-best joke. Alan Tudyk gives King Candy, the giggling, lisping ruler of Sugar Rush, a patter out of old vaudeville. Mindy Kaling’s Taffyta Muttonfudge leads the racers who bully Vanellope, and that scene is nastier than the sugar around it suggests.

Henry Jackman’s score is smarter than it needs to be: bleeps and chiptune inside Ralph’s own game, full orchestra once he crosses the strip, and the join is never fumbled. Tim Mertens cuts the race with a game’s rhythm, dropping now and then into the players’ view of the screen, so that for a second we are the children with the coins. Jennifer Lee and Phil Johnston’s script is neat about its rules and clear about what the medal means to a man who has never been thanked.

The comparison the film invites is with Pixar. Toy Story (1995) asked what toys do when the child is out of the house; this asks what games do when the arcade shuts, and it knows we will notice. The difference is that Toy Story never left its world; this one swaps its arcade for a sweet shop.

It runs 101 minutes and carries a PG, and children will have no trouble with any of it. Adults who put coins into these machines in 1985 will get most of the jokes and feel a small drop when the racing starts. Watch it for the first half hour, for Reilly, and for the kart. The race you can leave to the children.