RUBY GILLMAN, TEENAGE KRAKEN - Mark Reviews Movies

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 29, 2023

The beginning of Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken feels as if we're being thrown into the middle of the third or fourth installment of a series (It's a genuine surprise to learn, by the way, that this gimmicky, youth-oriented premise isn't based on some pre-existing young adult book or graphic novel series). It introduces us to the real nature of krakens, those giant creatures that attack ships in myths and legends, as fairly ordinary and mostly harmless beings, even if, in order to maintain their society, they did have a war with other undersea creatures, such as the leviathan and particularly vicious mermaids.

This is reasonable enough, but the next bit of back story really makes it seem as if we're missing a lot. The screenplay—written by Pam Brady, Kirk DeMicco, Elliott DiGuiseppi, and Brian C. Brown—starts with the setup but immediately fails to ground its premise in a reasonable way.

One family of krakens, we learn, has abandoned life in the ocean for 12 years and moved to the relatively dry land of a seaside town. Why they have done this is mostly irrelevant, although the entire movie eventually becomes a plot about discovering the reason and dealing with the consequences stemming from that battle with a different species of underwater creature. The far more intriguing and potentially funny idea is how this family of blue-skinned, gill-having, and clearly-not-human creatures have managed to get away with the ruse of being a perfectly normal family of human beings.

Sadly, the movie forgoes that conceit, tossing us into the middle of that tale with the Gillman clan fitting in without any trouble among the unaware and surprisingly uncurious population of the town. The throwaway joke is that the Gillmans merely chalk up any oddities about their appearance and/or behavior to the lie that they're originally from Canada. It's a decent joke, but once it becomes clear that it's the only one the filmmakers can imagine for the troubles and trials of these characters trying to hide their true nature, we realize that neither the comedy nor the characters are of vital concern to the movie.

Instead, the plotting kicks into gear almost immediately, despite some promise with the notion of Ruby (voice of Lana Condor), the elder child of the Gillman family, trying to get a date for her high school's upcoming junior prom. Ruby has made a concerted effort to fit in at school (a process that seems rife with comedic potential, although the narrative has skipped over that entirely), and the young kraken, disguising her tentacles as human appendages and wearing turtlenecks to cover up her gills, has succeeded as well as she can.

No one, not even her trio of best friends (each one either dull or mildly irritating), can tell that she or any of her family members—her real estate agent mother Agatha (voice of Toni Collette), miniature ship builder father Arthur (voice of Colman Domingo), and dodgeball enthusiast younger brother Sam (voice of Blue Chapman)—is a mythical sea creature in disguise. It's a stretch, of course, and passing over the entire back story of how the family pulled off this deceit kind of shows how ultimately unimaginative the story, characters, and world here are.

The plot bypasses all of that to become the tale of Ruby trying to reconnect with her kraken roots, following the arrival of her maternal uncle Brill (voice of Sam Richardson) and discovering that her grandmother (voice of Jane Fonda) is the warrior queen of the krakens, befriending a disguised mermaid who calls herself Chelsea Van Der Zee (voice of Annie Murphy). Ruby sneaks away from home, ignoring her friends and evading the disapproval of her mother, to learn about her kraken powers and help Chelsea find a legendary trident. The two believe that finding it could put an end to the kraken-mermaid hostilities once and for all.

As it stands, the material is slightly amusing, mainly when it does focus on the family trying to be "normal," and has a sense of personality, highlighted by the cartoony design of its characters. Everything about it, though, feels overly generic and non-specific—from the broad comic relief of a sea captain/tourist bus driver (voiced by Will Forte) who goes searching for Ruby when she accidentally discovers why her mother doesn't want her going into the water, to the whatsit-hunt and training montage of the main plot, to the fact that the alleged wonders of the undersea world seem intentionally diminished by keeping most the underwater scenes drenched in shadows.

There's really not much to say about the movie in general, because it's far more concerned with fitting into a routine formula, right up to and including an action-heavy climax that pits giant sea creatures against each other, than exploring the specific comic and imaginative possibilities of its premise. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken may have a slightly unique central conceit, but unfortunately, the filmmakers do nothing unique with it.

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