‘Ray Gunn’ Review: Sam Rockwell in Brad Bird Netflix Neo-Noir Cartoon

Ray Gunn (Sam Rockwell), private eye, is special. He’s “the only honest player in a crooked game,” the only dick who prioritizes things like truth and justice over cold hard cash. In a retrofuturistic society where aliens are disdained as second-class citizens, he’s the rare human who stands up for extraterrestrials. Some scorn him for his heroism; others admire him for it; all agree he’s something of an oddity.

Ray Gunn, Netflix’s new Skydance Animation feature from Pixar alum Brad Bird, is not special. It’s a blandly palatable jumble of sci-fi and neo-noir clichés, not so much awful as underwhelming. Lacking in both visual pop and emotional specificity, it’s a forgettable entry in an otherwise rich career that’s run the gamut from Ratatouille to The Incredibles to Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.

The screenplay, by Bird and Matthew Robbins, assembles paper-thin characters in service of a PG storyline that’s simultaneously too simplistic for adults and too serious-minded for kids. In the bustling city of Metropia — think 1940s Manhattan but with hovercars and jetpacks — Ray is a detective so hard up for cash that his office gets a little emptier every time he returns to it, his coat rack and his couch and then his desk getting repo’d one by one.

Ray’s problem is not a dearth of skill, but an overabundance of conscience. He’s such a mensch that even as he’s fleeing from a dangerously botched job, he can’t help but stop to rescue the gangster who’d just been trying to murder him. “These things, why do you do them?” groans his partner, a spindly one-eyed being named Eye-Ra (Tom Waits).

But Ray’s fortunes seem set to change once he’s hired by MegaMax studio head Vogel (Alan Tudyk) to wrangle Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), the studio’s biggest musician. All Ray has to do, to the tune of three times his normal rate, is keep the famously volatile artist out of trouble. The best way Ray can think of to do so is to tail her shady husband, Dom (Bobby Cannavale) — all the way into a sordid (but still vaguely family-friendly) web of deceit, murder, blackmail and gangland drama.

The first thing you notice about Ray Gunn, basically as soon as that Netflix rainbow disappears in the opening seconds, is that it looks … fine. Metropia, with its bright gleaming surfaces, evokes a Disneyland-ified version of the cities in The Fifth Element or Blade Runner. Ray and Venus are pretty, but in an unremarkable way you wouldn’t be able to pick out of a lineup. The rare memorable details — like the glazed-porcelain skin on an alien mob boss (Matt Berry’s Slugsy), so vivid it looks almost tactile — only serve to highlight how textureless and weightless and frankly cheap the rest of the film looks.

The action is zippy, as anything involving bodies falling hundreds of feet or hovercars crashing through glass office buildings is bound to be, but for the most part not especially inventive. The exception is a shootout that flirts with body horror thanks to a malfunctioning blaster; it’s a surprising burst of creativity that will leave you wondering where that energy was the rest of the time.

The indistinctiveness of the visuals is matched by the broadness of the characters and story. Ray, despite being the protagonist, has no personality beyond “good,” and only the vaguest suggestion of a backstory. (One of the few details we learn is that he’s a disgraced cop … but only because he’s such a good guy that he was made to take the fall for an actually corrupt cop.)

Venus is not much more than your standard-issue troubled starlet — screaming at her husband in public, fighting with the paps — until suddenly she develops a whole other personality out of nowhere that feels completely disconnected from the first. At least her original music is passable, even if the narrative context surrounding it can’t help but evoke Netflix’s much more successful KPop Demon Hunters. (Kimbra wrote and produced her songs; the score is by Michael Giacchino.)

The lone standout in the ensemble is Eye-Ra, voiced by Waits with a weariness that adds some sorely needed wit and weight to this too-slick world. He’s decent enough to admire Ray’s moral compass but pragmatic enough to suggest bending it a bit from time to time, and consistently funny enough to make this conundrum amusing. “We are months away from being able to afford ethics,” he complains after Ray turns down yet another shady payday.

While the plot gestures at potentially rich themes like xenophobia, corporate corruption, the perils of celebrity and even the looming threat of artificial intelligence, Ray Gunn has not much to say about any of them beyond that they’re bad. One would imagine a scene like one in which Ray is forced to take a grievously injured Eye-Ra to an alien-only hospital after the human-only one refuses him service would take a beat to reflect on the cruelty of Metropia’s segregationist policies. Instead, the film rushes past it so quickly it’s all but forgotten just minutes later.

In at least one instance, all of Ray Gunn‘s biggest shortcomings converge in the most leadenly predictable of ways. A character’s complete and utter blandness becomes a major plot twist, which might scan as clever if not for the fact that it’s signaled so blatantly, anyone half-paying attention will surely have guessed the big reveal roughly 60 minutes before it’s confirmed.

Bird has said he’s been trying to make this project happen since before The Iron Giant, which I suppose makes this a professional triumph for him if not a creative one. But I can’t decide if that explains its mediocrity — this feels very much like a first draft of a project — or makes it all the more baffling that with decades to mull it over, he hasn’t managed to make it more interesting.