Set in a world where mankind and giant monsters live peacefully side by side, the entire world follows the competitive sport of Monster Wrestling wherein a town's monster alongside a human coach engage in matches with monsters from other towns. The town of Stoker-on-Avon was once home to the greatest monster and coach team of Rayburn and Jimbo Coyle before they were tragically lost at sea and presumed dead. Sometime later Avon's new monster, Tentacular (Terry Crews), becomes the world champion only to announce immediately afterwards he's abandoning Avon for a lucrative deal with the town of Slitherpoole. With no monster to justify the upkeep and maintenance of the Jimbo Coyle Stadium the town reluctantly decides to sell the stadium to be demolished for a parking lot which doesn't sit well with monster wrestling fan and Jimbo Coyle's daughter, Winnie (Geraldine Viswanathan), who sets out to find an unknown she can coach in the hopes of saving her father's stadium. Following many rejections, Winnie eventually stumbles across childhood friend and Rayburn's son Rayburn Jr.(Will Arnett) who is now taking dives for low rent matches under the name Steve the Stupendous. With Rayburn Jr./Steve now in debt for a large sum of money for winning a fight he was supposed to lose, he reluctantly goes to Avon with Winnie to train as a serious monster wrestler with a massive uphill journey for the both of them.
Loosely based on the graphic novel Monster on the Hill by Rob Harrell, Rumble comes from Paramount Animation, Reel FX Animation, and WWE Entertainment who've for the past 10 years have tried to branch out to younger skewing audiences with endeavors like the short lived TV show Saturday Morning Slam, and several animated direct-to-video productions usually involving Hanna-Barbera characters like The Flintstones, Jetsons, or Scooby-Doo. Originally intended as a major film for the 2020 Summer movie season, Rumble like many other films found itself pushed around the release calendar until much like Paramount actioneer Infinite, the film's theatrical release was cancelled and instead the film was repositioned as an exclusive for Paramount+. The end result is certainly a colorful and energetic animated film and is probably Reel FX's best looking feature to date, but it also has a very banal by the numbers story and doesn't have the charm, humor, or creativity necessary to overcome its familiarity.
The movie's worldbuilding is virtually non-existent with an ESPN style info dump opening that sets up monsters appeared and then they started wrestling for sport. That's basically all the info we get in regards to this world and aside from the wrestlers being monsters, they pretty much behave and are treated like everyday people except bigger. The world more or less looks and feels like our world but there's no effort giving as to how this society of humans and monsters operates with us never seeing where the monsters live when they're outside of the ring, if the monsters are involved in activities outside of monster wrestling, or even what and how they eat. When you compare this movie to something like How to Train Your Dragon or Zootopia, the amount of thought and creativity that goes into making those worlds feel like tangible living places really puts Rumble to even greater shame because the movie doesn't have even a tenth the creativity you saw in those films. Some of the monster designs do occasionally look a little interesting, but they also often feel like leftover assets from How to Train Your Dragon or Monsters vs. Aliens not surprising given the director, Hamish Grieve here making his feature debut, is primarily known as an animator on several Dreamworks films.
The story is pretty much your standard underdog sports story, down to the fact the characters of Winnie and Steve will often call attention to tropes of the genre often providing commentary on montage workout songs or "rousing coach speeches" in what basically amounts to "this is cliché, but we're winking while doing the cliches which excuses them". As Rocky and Bullwinkle the movie proved, just because you acknowledge something is awkward or corny doesn't make it funny in the movie. Geraldine Viswanathan as Winnie is your typical "high energy, big heart" protagonist who's basically just there to serve as an audience proxy through which the audience can project themselves, and Will Arnett as Steve feels like he's trying to resonate with Steve's core of "not living up to his father's image", but the fact Steve loved his father and looked like he had a fairly happy childhood doesn't really make us understand how he got to the point where he's now a cynical lay about who's now content to lose for a living, and it feels like there's a missing transition from how Steve got from Point A to Point B.
The movie is well animated I supposed. It's a bright colorful film with smoothly rendered movement and character models and there are a few visual references and easter eggs to wrestlers like Hulk Hogan and Jerry Lawler, and I'm sure there are probably others but as I'm not as entrenched in the wrestling world as others it's highly likely I missed them.
Rumble has a nugget of a good idea being a mixture of professional wrestling and giant monsters, but a lack of creativity or interesting characters coupled with a clichéd story that is self-aware of its own cliches and uses them anyway just left me feeling like the film was rather cynical. It is well made and if you have young children who love wrestling and/or monsters they'll probably be reasonably entertained by the film, but by that measure there's really not much here that elevates the film above one of WWE's direct-to-video Hanna-Barbera crossovers aside from a bigger animation budget.
