Stream It Or Skip It?

The Twits (now on Netflix) opens on a halcyonic Disney vibe with swelling strings and choir and then it KABOOFs out of existence like goodness repelled from the room by rancid flatulence. Nice things are hereby replaced with bugs and toilets and eyeball soup, and from there the blecch never lets up. This animated thing takes Roald Dahl’s rather mean-spirited 1980 children’s book about the Twits, an unkempt couple with a truly diseased and hateful marriage, and bloats it to feature length by wedging in some sad orphan characters and, if you’re feeling particularly pilled, some half-perfunctory, half-half-assed political allegory. Paul Johnston shifts from writing Zootopia and the Wreck-it-Ralph movies to co-directing this adaptation – the first since Netflix acquired the Dahl IP – and drums up enough poop and fart jokes to fill three movies. For better or worse. Mostly worse.

THE TWITS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s worth noting that Dahl thought beards were gross, so he wrote The Twits. Of course, he also thought Jewish people were gross, so reason wasn’t his strong suit. Anyway, the film opens inside a disgusting man’s beard, where a mama flea (Emilia Clarke) participates in a narrative framing device by telling her baby flea a putrescent bedtime story about the Twits, a shitty shitty married couple who live in a town called Triperot. In fact, the beard in which they’re nestled belongs to Mr. Twit (Johnny Vegas), who shows affection to Mrs. Twit (Margo Martindale) by playing nasty pranks on her, and she responds in kind. But what keeps these two assholes together is their capitalist dream of opening Twitlandia, a theme park apparently designed to give paying customers staph infections, lice, tetanus and/or hepatitis A. Rides are made out of outhouses; a bouncy pit consists of insect-ridden mattresses with exposed springs tossed in a hole; an enclosed slide resembles a winding stretch of colon. It still may be preferable to Six Flags. 

At this point, mama flea tells her child that it’s time for a song, thus revealing The Twits to exist somewhere on the “animated musical comedy” spectrum. The kid protests. “It’s only one song – settle down!” the mama says, which is a lie, because I think there’s three in the movie. Three songs, none of them memorable or even particularly complete, written by David Byrne, which I only learned upon reading the end credits. “We’re the only ones out here who are freeeeee!” sing the Twits. Soon enough, a turquoise fantasy creature known as a Muggle-Wump voiced by Natalie Portman will sing again. It was not a hallucination. I confirmed that via multiple sources. What a world.

Elsewhere. In a Triperot home for orphans live 12-year-old Beesha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and her younger pal Bubsy (Ryan Lopez). They exist in the story so we have someone to root for. They’re sad because nobody will adopt them, especially after the city officially labels Twitlandia condemned, prompting the Twits to steal a tanker truck of “liquid hot dog meat” and flood the city with glop, thus tainting the water supply and influencing a family to pass on adopting Bubsy because he’s “contaminated.” Life is pain. 

Irked by these developments, Bubsy and Beesha get to snooping around the Twits’ compound, which is chock-full of dead fish, grotesque taxidermy and stolen bowling pins. Out in the barn they find the Muggle-Wumps, which you absolutely should not get confused with the Mugwumps from Naked Lunch. They’re much cuter – but being in The Twits, this just means they’re less ugly than everything else. Apparently the Twits use the Muggle-Wumps’ tears to fuel Twitlandia, an alternative energy source that strikes me as not particularly convenient, wholesome or friendly to sentient quasi-magical creatures. As Bubsy and Beesha seek a means to free the poor suffering Muggle-Wumps from their prison, the Twits decide to run for mayor so they can un-condemn their junkyard carnival, a plot development that finds them debating the incumbent, Wayne John John-John (Jason Mantzoukas), who eats tainted liquid-hot-dog-meat cake on stage until his ass literally balloons up and explodes. So I take it back – the political allegory here isn’t quite as half-half-assed as I let on.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Twits is a more nausea-inducing version of manic hallucination Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs crossed with a child-friendly miserablism derived from Memoir of a Snail, functioning in the shadow of far more appealingly offbeat Netflix animated films like The Willoughbys and The Mitchells vs. the Machines. 

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Any movie that keeps Martindale gainfully employed is – well, not always a good movie. But it’s doing good things.

Memorable Dialogue: Mr. Twit is confused about the definition of “diorama”:

Mr. Twit: I’m playing wit me diarrhea!

Mrs. Twit: You think squishing your face around in diarrhea is somehow gonna bring them Muggle-Wumps back?

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I’m no prude – a good fart joke goes a long way. But what about a steaming bucketful of them? Along with gags showing and/or referencing hairballs, boogers, chiggers, diarrhea, phlegm, worms and the licking of toad toes? Has the movie missed anything? Yes – the toe jam and clumping-cat-litter lobbies will be screaming bloody murder at the exclusion. Which I guess means that The Twits COULD be grosser than it is, which already is pretty gross, and quite possibly grosser than gross. Like when you open up the oven and the rump roast farts, with a frequency of approximately one-seventeenth of the pooting and/or pooping depicted in this movie.

Surely this is intentional. And to a degree in the wicked spirit of Dahl’s book, although I’ll leave the comparisons to the source material to those harboring nostalgia for his work. (I don’t remember ever getting any deeper into the bibliography than James and the Giant Peach.) The orphans are an egregiously manipulative addition to the text, surely calculated to counterbalance the proliferation of visual and verbal ick and a shrill tin-on-tin-through-a-megaphone tone, but that doesn’t tame the movie’s profligate, unapologetic obnoxiousness. Yes, it’s purposely ugly, rough around the edges visually (and a little chintzy looking in its 3-D animation), and that’s supposed to be part of its appeal – an active resistance against the clean lines and gloss of other animations for children, perhaps. But we’re left with the feeling that it’s trying too hard to be anti- that it fails to establish its core aesthetic and thematic motives.

So it’s a film that fails on two primary fronts. The screenplay – by Johnston and Meg Favreau – is more thrown together than thoughtfully conceived and constructed: the musical bits, the ramshackle plot, the off-the-rack characters, the political whatnot (if you want to read into it; hint – you don’t have to!), the rickety framing device, the cutesy stabs at self-awareness, the insistence upon introducing new characters 30 minutes into an already overextended plot and the attempt to counteract any pessimistic views of life on Earth with treacly on-the-nose Lessons For Children about empathy, how everyone deserves to be loved and the nature of truth (“even if something’s not true, it’s very easy to convince yourself that it is”), sentiments tossed in at the 11th hour, a desperate last-chance stab at being nutritional, like dropping three little banana slices atop a six-quart mixing bowl full of high-fructose-corn-syrup cereal and rapidly curdling milk. It finally becomes pro- something at the very end. Too bad we’re already flooded with diarrhea by then.

Our Call: Apologies for the imagery, but it’s in the spirit of the movie: The Twits might give you the trots. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.