The Angry Birds Movie review: delightful all-ages comedy with a subversive streak

No film that ends – irrelevant spoiler alert – with cartoon animals shaking their booty to the strains of a Demi Lovato cover of I Will Survive has any business being any good at all. And then there's the not insignificant issue of bad timing. We know what you're thinking. Angry Birds? Is that still a thing? Really?

Animation, even in the digital age, entails far more time than the peak popular spell enjoyed by, say, Plants vs Zombies. Something like a geological age has passed since the Finnish game took off in 2010.

It gets worse. Birds may be the World’s Most Successful Mobile App. But that same world has seldom gotten along with such games-to-movies transfers as Super Mario Bros, Doom, Hitman and Prince of Persia.

Happily, surprisingly and delightfully, The Angry Birds Movie has practically nothing in common with the subgenre that foisted two Streetfighter films upon the human race, Taking cues from The Lego Movie, this pleasing all-ages comedy cleverly double codes its guffaws. Bouncy pratfalls jostle with high-fallutin' cultural references (Daft Punk, Kubrick, more Kubrick), and light lifestyle satire in a screenplay by Simpsons veteran John Vitti.

Red (Jason Sudekis, in comic existential crisis mode), the turbulent fowl at the centre of these shenanigans, is the only inhabitant of Bird Island to raise one of his perennially glowering eyebrows when a group of overly friendly green pigs arrive. Unmoved by the porcine visitors' gifts of slingshots, trampolines and their Blake Shelton live show, Red begrudgingly teams up with hyperactive Chuck (Frozen's Josh Gad) and the dull-witted Bomb (Danny McBride) to go in search of the island's long-lost leader Mighty Eagle (Peter Dinklage).

Animation veterans Fergal Reilly and Clay Kaytis ensure this Skittles-coloured universe is never less than zippy. But it’s the cast that makes the movie: Sudekis channels vintage Woody Allen, Sean Penn’s sub-monosyllable Terence turns grunts into nuanced performance, and Peter Dinklage offers a masterclass in pompous windbaggery.

The bird is the word.