Ralph Breaks the Internet

The Internet is a scary fucking place. It’s a wonderful place, too. You’ve heard this before, and you’ve experienced both sides if you’re at my site. More than anywhere else, it gives weirdos and freaks a place to fly their flags. And a lot of weirdos and freaks are dangerous assholes.

You can find anything on the Internet: Japanese landscapes with Godzilla lurking on the horizon; people doing unspeakable damage to their genitals; confessors revealing horrible secrets they’ve held within their dark souls; a Honda-specific clip to keep a door panel from rattling. You can buy shit, sell shit, see shit, play shit, say shit and disappear into a black hole that started with you looking for a filter for your coffee maker and ended where you learned how to milk a cat and then looked up pet adoption.

You wouldn’t know the Internet is that big from watching Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet, an overlong and sheltered animated comedy. It’s the sequel to Wreck-it Ralph, a kids’ movie about a vintage arcade bad guy in the Donkey Kong mold who lives with other video game characters inside an arcade. In that one, Ralph (John C. Reilly) is tired of being stereotyped because he plays a guy who smashes buildings. He wants people to know he’s got feelings.

We can all identify with wanting to break free from being typecast. Hell, everyone thought of me as the kid who always shit his pants in high school just because of the one time I did it on eight separate occasions my freshman year. I wanted my classmates to know there was more to me: I was also the kid who stopped getting boners in the showers after PE, and the kid who only shat himself three times his sophomore year. Junior year was worse again, but I consider it an outlier. It’s taken me nearly a lifetime of saying dirty words on the Internet to escape that stereotype and finally no longer be known as a pants-shitter, but instead as a guy who writes about pants-shitting.

The point is, Wreck-it Ralph had a cute, colorful way to tell a universal theme. It was an okay movie, aggressively cheerful and with tortured plotting. But at least it had something to say. Ralph Breaks the Internet has a shitload of opportunities to say something and chooses to say very little.

I guess it’s written for kids, but who better to warn away from the time and soul suck of the Internet. Who better to warn that it’s a portal to another dimension where good intentions go to die, buried under an avalanche of useless information and worthless opinions? To ignore this is fucking irresponsible. It’s like telling your kids the Vietnam War was wonderful because it introduced our soldiers to new cultures.

This movie strenuously celebrates shit. Videos of getting hit in the nuts are a hero. Making viral videos is a great way to make money! Spam is fun and spammers are your friends. Scary, violent games are actually full of nice people. The Internet is full of kind strangers who just want to help you. What could possibly go wrong with telling kids these things?

At first, I thought Ralph would set up the promise of the Internet only to expose the reality. But no. It is as relentlessly upbeat as the fat kid on the high school cheerleading squad. It becomes distracting. Were the writer/directors Phil Johnston and Rich Moore under a gag order to keep this bullshit peppy?

In Ralph Breaks the Internet, the titular hero and his pre-teen best friend Vannelope (Sarah Silverman) must journey out of their arcade world and into the big scary Internet to get a new steering wheel for her video game. Without it, her game will be scrapped and she’ll be homeless. There’s a story there in the new burying the old, and how what we once loved just becomes another layer of the forest floor, feeding the latest gadgets and diversions that grow, wither and get buried yet again. Somewhere under our feet are the remains of Milli Vanilli, Carmen Sandiego, Mattel Electronics, and Arthur Fonzarelli.

There’s also a pretty fucking laughable scene where some pre-teen girls come to an arcade just to play retro games. In reality, it’s almost always old guys in arcades trying to recapture some glory, the sort of guys whose lives have turned out so shitty that their fondest memories are of being good at Donkey Kong.

Ralph refuses to allow the darkness in. That’s fine in a fantasy world, but this movie wants to take us to the Internet, a very real place. The movie makes it a brightly colored wonderland of goodness where everyone is trying to help the heroes. To raise money to buy the steering wheel, Ralph makes viral videos of himself getting attacked by bees or hit by things, and quickly makes tens of thousands of dollars. I love when kids’ movies tell kids not to have passion but to do whatever it takes to make money. Such a Disney message! A spammer who, for whatever reason, talks like Humphrey Bogart, isn’t trying to infect a computer with malware and steal identities. He’s just a hard-working, misunderstood guy who not only tries to help Ralph and Vanellope, but also tries to rescue them. Ralph and Vanellope can turn any corner or go into any alley and everything is safe.

After celebrating an empty and artificial Internet for 90 minutes by repeating memes, mentioning brand names and celebrating the hidden altruism of Grand Theft Auto, which the target audience probably has not played much, Ralph finally makes a clumsy stab at saying two things. First is that Ralph and Vanellope can be friends even if she wants to explore this new world while he returns to the comfort of the arcade. It’s some trite horseshit about how friends don’t have to always be together, and it plays with all the subtlety and warmth of an After-School-Special starring Willie Aames. The other is that the Internet can amplify our insecurities. That’s a pretty good thing to tell kids. Too fucking bad it comes so late in the movie, and in a way that kids aren’t going to understand. All they will see is that Ralph became a giant monster and smashed stuff.

Ralph is a Disney movie, not Pixar, and besides being a shittier, coarser product overall, there is one major difference. Pixar avoids pop culture shit and of-the-moment gags, while it explores eternal themes of death and purpose. As a result, their stories have a timeless quality to them. What Pixar movie has aged poorly?

Ralph, on the other hand, is so of-the-moment that it already feels stale. Its themes are so tacked on that they won’t resonate. Kids won’t come back to this movie when they’re older and see deeper meaning in it. There is none and there is nothing here to reward multiple viewings except empty references to shit you recognize.

Besides, kids won’t come back to this movie. The gags, the memes and the viral videos it references have a very short shelf life, and many have already expired. As fast as the Internet evolves, imagine how tired this thing will feel in five more years. Ralph wasn’t built to last. It was built sloppily to go fast and take money and make you feel like you just wasted your time. Which is what the Internet does too. Two Fingers.