For a moment, PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie does something genuinely unprecedented in the realm of maddening kid-targeted entertainment: It apologizes to parents and caregivers in the audience. “To all the parents out there, I’m sorry,” a newscaster (Lil Rel Howery) says as an aside after announcing the proliferation of even more PAW Patrol merchandise opportunities during the second feature film starring the preferred animated babysitters of so many under-five children. It’s not a blanket mea culpa for, say, the earwormy and incessantly repeated PAW Patrol theme song, or the continuing prominence of particularly smug police-pup Chase, but at least it acknowledges two key tenets of PAW: It’s a global merchandising phenomenon moreso than it is a vehicle for stories the whole family can enjoy, and unlike some of the better kid-friendly entertainment out there, it’s not something that even attempts to entertain the parents who’ll get dragged along.
If the primary question is whether kids will like it, the answer is “almost certainly.” The pre-K target audience will be rapt, and even younger elementary-school-aged kids may have lived with the pups long enough to generate their own nascent version of earlier-childhood nostalgia. Then again, the most hardcore PAW Patrol fans in that demographic would probably enjoy watching old episodes of the show on Paramount+ just as much, so a new movie may or may not even register with them. So perhaps it’s best to ask a secondary question: What degree of parental torture are we talking about here?
The answer is that it’s relatively mild, assuming parents have built up a tolerance for the day-saving pups in the first place. By cribbing from the superhero movie playbook – retelling how the pups acquired various themed superpowers from a meteor – the movie imposes a bit more structure on their second big-screen adventure than we saw in the 2021 movie. Unlike that first movie or the similarly superpowered made-for-TV special PAW Patrol: Supercharged from 2018, The Mighty Movie does not feel like three or four episodes stitched together. It has a clearer premise than the diffuse first film, strategically deployed action sequences, two villains who team up halfway through, and even a couple of montages.
The Mighty Movie gives fan favorite Skye (voiced for the movie only by Ghostbusters: Afterlife star Mckenna Grace) her own traumatic backstory, following Chase’s central role in the first movie. She’s apparently struggled with physical smallness all her life, and one of The Mighty Movie’s few genuinely clever moments of kid empathy has Skye chafe at being picked up and manhandled by grown-ups who think she’s cute. Her new powers give her a major confidence boost, but she meets a formidable adversary in the form of mad scientist Victoria Vance (Taraji P. Henson). Meanwhile, Liberty (Marsai Martin) copes with her own lack of powers by training a trio of smaller prospective members of the Patrol, one of which is voiced by North West, whose mom Kim Kardashian reprises her cameo role from the first film.
That’s just part of The Mighty Movie flaunting a starrier cast than the first film. In addition to Kardashian, Howery, and Henson, Chris Rock contributes a one-line gag cameo and Kristen Bell seems to be doing an Edie McClurg impression, presumably in a bid not to confuse young Frozen fans into thinking Anna of Arendelle has relocated to Adventure City. These familiar voices are supposed to delight parents, but they mostly seem more like items in a celebrity gift bag – hence Kardashian securing her daughter North and son Saint their very own PAW Patrol vanity parts.
More than ever, most of the liveliness comes from silly villains, whose colorful goofiness at times recalls the outsized antagonists of the ’60s Batman TV series, if only briefly. Henson clearly has a ball voicing Victoria, who meets the irrepressible Mayor Humdinger (Ron Pardo) and his pack of disdainful cats in jail.
Rather than marveling over the vaguely familiar vocal tones or appreciating the handful of decent villain gags, bored parents can spend some time considering how The Mighty Movie follows the fine tradition of superhero adventures creating screwy continuity. On the still-ongoing TV show, the pups live in Adventure Bay and occasionally transform into the superheroic mighty pups; in the movies, they make their home in Adventure City, and the reconfigured mighty-pup origin now includes a meteor crash apparently explosive enough to garner a PG rating. Though the destruction is indeed more intense than it is on TV, urging any caution for a preschool-targeted movie is another strange MPA decision. If a PAW Patrol movie can’t receive a G, it’s hard to imagine what could.
Regardless, the destruction of their high-tech base of operations doesn’t matter much to the unflappable pups. Though they’re momentarily aghast – “Our vehicles!” one of them cries, though they restrain themselves from lamenting the loss of their awesome accessories – they simply relocate to a second, already-built playset, er, high-tech base (reminiscent of The Transformers: The Movie back in 1986, where characters were killed off and replaced with cool new products). These canine characters exist in a kiddie utopia where toys (and, to a lesser extent, their human, benevolent taskmaster Ryder) replace parents as the true authority. No matter what kind of shenanigans the pups get into, someone offscreen will always buy them more PAW Patrol junk.
