If John Travolta never gets his live acting career back on track he can always rely on voice acting. Bolt may be the best thing Travolta's done in the last ten years (if you ignore the extras on the set). It never seeks to break the mold of the buddy road trip formula, but it does find new tricks to play on the dog-cat relationship that has been an animation staple since who knows when. Cave paintings, I think. As it turns out, all the cat versus dog dynamic needed was a dramatically overconfident dog and a horribly jaded cat - Bolt fetches and then delivers.
Bolt (John Travolta) lives in a Truman Show-esque existence. He thinks he's a superpowered spy dog capable of barking sonic booms, jumping over helicopters and turning machine guns to slag with his heat-ray emitting eyes. Pretty much he thinks he's superdog - and that's exactly the way the director wants it. The director (voiced perfectly by James Lipton), who is downright Michael Bay-ic in character, pulls all of the strings and jumps through hoops so Bolt never doubts for an instant that he is the character he plays. Even his loving human Penny (Miley Cyrus) thinks the whole treatment is over the top. But you can't argue with the results - Bolt delivers show stopping performances with each episode. Or, at least he did. The studio big wigs aren't happy with the formula of the show and notify the director he needs to give a sad ending or find himself a new job. To appease the powers that be, the director has Penny fall into the hands of the villainous Dr. Calico (Malcolm McDowell) as a cliffhanger. The only problem with keeping the in-character canine in the dark is he thinks Penny has truly been kidnapped.
Managing to escape from his trailer, Bolt takes off on an unfortunately unnecessary journey to save Penny, only to get shipped across the country to New York. Vowing to reunite with Penny, he kidnaps the streetwise cat Mittens (Susie Essman), recruits the help of gerbil-in-a-ball Rhino (Mark Walton) and heads back to Hollywood. It's the initial interactions of Mittens and Bolt that prove to be funniest as towards the end it becomes quite sappy as it devolves into a clip show of Bolt learning what it means to be a real dog. But we learn something....about...ourselves, so that's not bad right?
Just as the plot drifts off from the funnier "I'm a dog way out of my league in the real world" into a more serious "let's talk about our abandonment issues" tone, the interactions of Bolt and Mittens follow. Which is why the addition of the overly enthusiastic Rhino adds levity but in such a way that it's actually too much. You can't help but feel the part was written for Jack Black (even though the extras would try to convince us Mark Walton was the best and only choice for the character. Please, we can tell within five minutes of the character speaking who the writers were expecting to play the part. No matter who would've played the part, the problem of an overly zany character trying to brighten a very tender and somber midsection is just too glaring. When Bolt and Mittens finally do have their formulaic "we want different things" falling out towards the end, we're almost thinking ‘about freakin' time'. There's really just too much time spent on the development of Bolt as a normal dog. The unnecessary development is even more obnoxious when he seems to dump it all just to jump back into the role of action-mutt seconds later.
The voice acting was fantastic, it was just the film's pacing and plot that needs some reshuffling.
A major plus and something I can't really stress enough is the beauty of Bolt. For all its shortcomings in the plot department, Bolt looks tremendous and crisp on a high definition display. The opening action sequence along is somewhat jaw-dropping. The textures are perfect and the colors are vibrant. While I haven't yet seen Wall-E in high-definition, this viewing of Bolt may be the best use of high definition I've ever seen. It truly is a visual feast. Sadly, my audio setup has yet to catch up to the video - though when my subwoofer kicked in the audio held its own.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Well, like Disney has become wont to do, all three possible formats of Bolt are included in this swanky package: Blu-ray, DVD and digital copy. Beyond that we have a few decent production featurettes including "In Session with John Travolta and Miley Cyrus", "A New Breed of Directors: A Filmmakers' Journey", "Act, Speak! The Voices of Bolt", "Creating the World of Bolt" and the "Bolt Art Gallery". All of these are much more interesting for the parental edges of the audience and will probably bore the chitlins to tears. These featurettes are interesting, but considering "Act, Speak! The Voices of Bolt" has directors Byron Howard and Chris Williams telling us how they pretty much wanted the cast to speak in their normal voices (minus Miley Cyrus) it makes us wonder how much voice acting work the cast actually had to do.
"Super Rhino Short"
Here we have a fun, snappy, fully rendered short about Rhino's dream wherein he has Bolt-esque superpowers. Out of the film's heavier context we're free to laugh at Rhino's exuberance. The kids will want to watch this over and over again.
"I Thought I Lost You" Music Video
John Travolta and Miley Cyrus sing the movie's - or at least one of the movie's theme songs. After watching them gush over how much fun it was working with one another in the "In Session with John Travolta and Miley Cyrus" featurette the music video doesn't really do much for our expectations. Sure they've both proven they have lungs, but the song itself is just boring and drab.
"Deleted Scenes"
Here's an interesting take on the deleted scene concept as the piece the directors introduce a non-rendered sequence where Bolt gets the tar kicked out of him only to have it replaced with the realization that he isn't the super dog he thought he was. It's no wonder they decided to go a lighter route in the film as this version is decidedly dark and grisly.
Bolt's Be-Awesome Mission Game
I was kinda psyched to play a game. Good bye psychage, apparently you can't play the game if you're watching it on a PS3. That's right, stand-alone Blu-ray players only for this feature. With that said, I really couldn't get past the first level.
The phenomenal visual experience combined with a decent voice cast makes Bolt a worthwhile viewing. John Travolta's performance alone (for at least the first half) delivers its fair share of laugh out loud moments. Even if you don't have kids, at least rent it on Blu-ray to see the kick ass animation.
"Bolt" is on sale March 24, 2009 and is rated PG. Adventure, Animation, Children & Family. Directed by Byron Howard, Chris Williams. Written by Dan Fogelman, Chris Williams. Starring Diedrich Bader, John Travolta, Miley Cyrus, Susie Essman, Mark Walton, James Lipton, Malcolm McDowell.
