The missing link movie
It has a who - Lionel, Sasquatch, and their eventual accomplice, Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldana, clearly having fun) - a what (getting from here to there), a when (the late 1800s), several wheres (many, many, many places), a why (so Sasquatch can find his people and Lionel can find validation), and a how (inventive thievery, fisticuffs, and creative problem-solving on horseback, steamer ship, and mountain village).Īside from the recurring threat of the sneering cowboy Willard Stenk (Timothy Olyphant satirizing his own Justified persona), our heroes aren’t fighting against anything. Missing Link has all the requisite storytelling elements but one. Sounds like a simple enough quest, right? All they have to do is avoid the evil scoundrel on their trail. So he and Lionel make a deal: if Lionel will take him to Shangri-La, he will provide Lionel with all the evidence needed to prove his existence and earn Lionel admission to the members-only adventurers’ club. That’s because this Sasquatch is the last of his kind, and he doesn’t want to end his days alone.
He wants to be discovered, he explains, because he hopes Lionel will to take him to Shangri-La, the legendary hidden city in the far-off Kunlun Mountains where he believes his distant cousins, the Yetis, may live. The story’s big twist (or at least it would be if you don’t watch the trailer) comes when Lionel finds the Sasquatch (Zach Galifianakis at his most extreme)… who turns out to have written the letter himself. The head of the club, Lord Piggot-Dunceby (a delightfully grumbly Stephen Fry), reluctantly agrees… and then hires a thug to kill Lionel, to ensure he can’t possibly complete his mission. He announces to the club that he intends to prove Sasquatch exists - and if he can, he wants to finally be admitted to their ranks. And this message is all that Lionel - who craves nothing more than validation from others - needs to hear in order to take action. “I think you’re the real deal, and so am I,” the letter says. Lionel is momentarily depressed and considers giving up on his adventuring dream altogether, until he gets a letter sent by someone in the Pacific Northwest who claims to have evidence of Bigfoot (or, in this film, Sasquatch). When Lionel tries to capture photographic evidence of the Loch Ness Monster, the resulting misadventure nearly kills his assistant, Mister Lint, who promptly quits. But the other old and stuffy adventurers all think he’s a reckless idiot, so they refuse him admission to their members-only club. He does this because he wants to be admitted to a private club of adventurers and be taken seriously for his contributions to the field of exploration. In a nutshell, Missing Link is the story of Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman in top comedy form), a wealthy playboy adventurer who spends his family fortune hunting evidence of the world’s greatest myths and legends.
THE MISSING LINK MOVIE MOVIE
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD for Missing Link, a movie without much plot to spoil. That’s when I realized Missing Link is missing a crucial storytelling ingredient. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why Missing Link seemed to fall a notch below the other Laika films until I started deconstructing its plot. It’s an ambitious film, and it’s well worth seeing… but I also found it frustratingly unsatisfying.
THE MISSING LINK MOVIE PLUS
So when I didn’t hear much buzz about their newest movie, Missing Link, I got worried.Īs it turns out, Missing Link has all the fantastic visual design and nimble storytelling that you’d expect from a Laika film, plus more outright humor than all their previous movies combined. When it comes to animation, Laika may not be as well-known as Pixar, but their films - including Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings - are always well-made, visually impressive, cleverly amusing, and reliably entertaining.