Roald Dahl was my favorite author growing up. I didn’t know what a prick he was at the time. Dahl described the world as a wretched place where dreams go to die, largely because of great big jerks (like himself), and as an innocent but observant child, I had already picked up on that. Innocent kids, in Dahl’s books, were forced to combat sadistic, ignorant adults. Sometimes we lost the battle, but usually we won (after chapters and chapters of torture). The biggest danger wasn’t losing. It was growing up into the same big jerks. Or, as Dahl called them in one of his nastiest books, “The Twits.”
“The Twits” is a ghastly little tale about wretched, irredeemable adults who hate each other — but hate everyone else even more. They’re mean to kids, they’re shockingly violent to animals and in the end the heroes straight-up murder them. All, according to Dahl, was finally right with the world, because some people really are evil, and — again, as he put it — they deserve to die.
Phil Johnston has taken Dahl’s story and padded it out, a lot, because Dahl’s book is short enough to read on a lunch break. This is the same Phil Johnston who co-wrote the “Wreck-It Ralph” movies and co-directed “Ralph Breaks the Internet.” It’s also the same Phil Johnston who co-wrote the almost unwatchably gross Sacha Baron Cohen comedy — come to think of it, let’s put “comedy” in quotation marks — “The Brothers Grimsby.” Johnston knows how to make movies for kids, but he didn’t make “The Twits” for kids. He made “The Twits” for Garbage Pail Kids.
“The Twits” has the green and brown, visibly moldy color palette of an old PlayStation 2 game. Not one of the good ones. The characters are, heroes and villains alike, hard to look at. One gets the impression Johnston is going for the handmade, childlike quality of the stop-motion film “My Life as a Zucchini,” or at least Tim Schafer’s “Psychonauts,” but he’s gone so far off the deep end making these characters and the world they inhabit ugly that he has, unfortunately, succeeded. Kids like gross stuff. Gak flew off the shelves. I myself had many a Boglin. But there’s nothing un-gross to latch onto in “The Twits.” There’s no corner of this movie we’d actually want to visit, and god help everyone who lives there.
The film finds the title villains, Mr. and Mrs. Twit (Johnny Vegas and Margo Martindale), building an amusement park out of old porta-potties and soiled mattresses. When they’re shut down by the state — and with good cause! — they exact their revenge by filling the town water system with liquified hot dogs. This captures the attention of two local orphans, Beesha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Bubsy (Ryan Anderson Lopez), who visit the Twits’ park and discover they’ve imprisoned [checks notes] magic monkeys whose tears can solve the world’s energy crisis.
Sure. Whatever. Let’s go with that.
Beesha and Bubsy rescue the monkeys but the Twits are on their tail, squelching across the city like Troma villains who accidentally wound up in the wrong film. This is where “The Twits” starts taking huge liberties with Dahl’s story, because in Dahl’s story the Twits were undeniably despicable, and everyone in town had enough good sense to hate them. 45 years after the book’s publication we live in a world where undeniably despicable people run the government, by popular mandate no less, and that exactly what starts to happen to The Twits. They don’t even have to pretend they’re not evil. They just promise they’ll fix the economy, and everyone starts attacking helpless children.
It’s topical, you can’t deny that. It’s easy to admire Johnston and co-writer Meg Favreau. They transformed one of Dahl’s simplest stories into a complex modern morality tale. The fault in “The Twits” isn’t in the ideas, it’s in the execution. Set aside for a moment that the movie is literally hard to look at: it’s also tonally chaotic, and repeatedly trips over its own unspeakable horrors, before falling face-first into bowls of insufferable sugar.
The monkeys the Twits kidnapped are, it turns out, the perfect parents for Beesha and Bubsy. As voiced by Natalie Portman and Timothy Simons, their eye-rolling sweetness is the only thing more sickening than the Twits themselves. Except the part where a guy’s butt literally explodes. To quote the great Norville Barnes: “You know, for kids!”
Every kids movie these days comes across as desperate. They just want to be liked, which usually means they don’t take chances. “The Twits” isn’t trying to be liked, and that’s to the filmmakers’ credit. Good for them for making something weird and gross, which can’t possibly appeal to everybody. The downside is, I’m not sure this appeals to anybody. As much as any adult can be, I’m in the target demo for “The Twits.” I’ve read all of Roald Dahl’s books. I admire their jerkiness, even if I don’t think highly of the jerk who wrote them. “The Twits” was never Dahl’s best work, but at least it was short. “The Twits” is one of the worst Dahl adaptations, and I wish it was shorter.
