Review: “Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank” is one mutt of a movie.
Where “Blazing Saddles” confronted prejudice head-on, putting a Black sheriff in a narrow-minded, White frontier town, “Paws” takes the bite out of the earlier film’s satire by populating this kid-friendly tale with — wait for it — cats and dogs. In this version, our hero is a naive pup named Hank , who dreams of becoming a katana-wielding warrior when he’s tasked with protecting the feline population of the fictional village of Kakamucho.
“Saddles” team: Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor and Alan Uger. The loose framework of the “Saddles” plot remains, and the 96-year-old Brooks delightfully voices the shogun who rules over Kakamucho . Yet this animated homage feels more hollow than honest, parroting the story beats and comedic stylings of “Saddles” without any of its subversive humor. Logical for a kid’s movie? Yes, but still jarring.
That doesn’t leave a lot of time to flesh out characters, though it’s not for a lack of trying. Filling the Gene Wilder role from “Saddles,” an amusing Samuel L. Jackson voices Jimbo, a tuxedo cat who was once an esteemed samurai but now drinks away his sorrows with a catnip brew. Ricky Gervais is on autopilot as Ika Chu, the diabolical Somali cat who wants to perfect the view from his palace by wiping Kakamucho off the map.
For little ones oblivious to this movie’s inspiration, the rote character arcs and commendable morals should land just fine. And “Paws of Fury” does occasionally get its claws out with pointed observations about gun control, xenophobia and irrational intolerance. Such barbs, however, get lost in a barrage of fart jokes and inane action. In the end, alas, this noisy spectacle is more bark than bite.At area theaters. Contains action, violence, rude and suggestive humor, and some strong language.
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