Teen Titans Go! to the Movies (2018)

Film: Teen Titans Go! to the Movies (2018)
Stars: Greg Cipes, Scott Menville, Khary Payton, Tara Strong, Hynden Walch, Will Arnett, Kristen Bell, Nicolas Cage
Director: Peter Rida Michail & Aaron Horvath
Oscar History: Not even in weak year for Animated Feature
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I don't have a lot of guilty pleasures that I indulge in about which I actually feel guilty.  As a general rule people throw the phrase "guilty pleasure" around for things like The Bachelorette, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, or the Transformers movies, and I don't have time for that (though thanks to the OVP I have seen three of the Transformers movies).  However, one of the few guilty pleasures I do, and arguably the most "bachelor, straight guy thing" I do for a guy who is Kinsey-6 gay is that I love, love, love Teen Titans Go!, to the point where my default channel on my TV is Cartoon Network.  The silly, ridiculous, but always clever adventures of these five teens as they occasionally save the world but usually get distracted by food are a joy, and as a result, Teen Titans Go! to the Movies is the first franchise movie in a very long time that I genuinely could not wait to see, and so as a result I actually went to the movies on a Wednesday night (arguably my toughest night to get to the movies) and finally got to catch where the gang went when they had a chance at the big screen.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie follows our friends Starfire (Strong), Raven (Walch), Cyborg (Payton), Robin (Manville), and Beast Boy (Cipes) as they initially are mocked for not being able to defeat the villain destroying Jump City because they want to finish their well-choreographed dance number on a rooftop, and then we watch as Robin attempts to become a movie star like so many of the other DC Characters.  Robin's attempts to break into cinema are classic Titans, with them first doing several unsuccessful attempts (the best being going back in time to try and stop superheroes from becoming famous), and then eventually Robin getting his own movie without the Titans.  As you can imagine, this doesn't turn out well, but the Titans save the day and foil the dastardly Slade (a wonderfully wry Will Arnett, who also produced the film), just in time for a post-credits scene featuring the original Teen Titans, fueling speculation that the defunct series could come back to the small screen if enough people see this movie.  After all, what is a superhero movie without a promised sequel?

The film, like the show, is at its best when it's getting self-referential or meta.  For my taste as a big fan, I wish there had been more winks to the actual series, as for me there's never enough (for all of the talk about waffles, a quick "WAFFLES, WAFFLES, WAFFLES" from Beast Boy & Cyborg surely wouldn't have been too much to ask, right?), but background appearances from Sticky Joe, Control Freak, and Silkie were all super cute, and the briefest of hints to Starfire/Robin and Beast Boy/Raven relationships were well-received.  Perhaps best were the meta moments, where we see the entire film skewer the DC Comic land-strip.  Occasionally these bits feel borrowed from another Will Arnett movie (The Lego Batman Movie arguably does this better, albeit with less heart and ribbing), but these are all received with aplomb, particularly the continued mockery of the Challengers of the Unknown (one of DC's lesser-known villains), the game cameo from Stan Lee (in a DC movie!), and the huge wink to comic book nerds everywhere when Nicolas Cage finally got to play Superman in a movie.  If nothing else, getting to see Cage say the stoic, stereotypical words of Kal-El on the big-screen was worth the ticket price.

I just kind of wish they'd had gone for more of the fun of the series.  Don't get me wrong-I liked the movie, but more winks to the supporting characters and their nuances (Raven, in particular, feels underwritten) in favor of the most easily identifiable of these five characters (Robin), felt a little bit underwhelming.  The movie also occasionally struggles in pushing what is usually a 12-minute cartoon into 90 minutes, and as a result it never quite has the cleverness of The Lego Batman Movie, its most obvious counterpoint.  Still, though, in a landscape overwrought with predictable, tired superhero movies, this is a treat and well worth it for any fan of the series.  Now if only we could get a Gumball movie going, we'd be set!