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“Welcome to the future,” we hear several times in “Ray Gunn” — not that the brave new world it presents is all that welcoming. Or, for that matter, particularly brave or new. The good news is we finally have flying
cars and superpowered jetpacks; in other respects, though, we haven’t come a long way at all. Co-existence with extraterrestrials has seen humans revert to old habits of prejudice and apartheid; crime and corruption are rampant as ever; pop-up ads now irksomely manifest as holograms in your personal space. Still, at least the future looks good. The fifth animated feature from Brad Bird is a handsome return to the retro-futurism he previously practiced in “The Incredibles” and his live-action oddity “Tomorrowland”: in this case, a vision of an impossible 21st-century metropolis as might have been dreamed in 1939.
The world-building — indeed, even just the building-building — is the principal ongoing thrill of “Ray Gun,” as it zips restlessly between gorgeous Art Deco skyscrapers, smokily lit Old Hollywood nightclubs and vividly kitsch rent-a-rooms, all rendered in chic, clashing scarlets and lilacs and burgundies, in vehicles that may be futuristically engineered, but have the luxurious, elongated curves of pre-WWII automobiles. Like “Blade Runner,” Bird’s film sits in the genre-melding realm of sci-fi noir; unlike “Blade Runner,” with its seamy, rain-sodden transformation of Los Angeles, this lighter, brighter detective story is not willing to sacrifice much gleam.
And fair enough: “Ray Gunn” is a caper first and foremost, with all its gumshoe antics safely in the PG-rated zone, though one suspects many of today’s kids may be entirely bewildered by it. (After all, Robert Zemeckis’ peerless “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” — the original and best repurposing of noir tropes for family entertainment, and a clear creative touchstone here — is now very nearly as old as the 1940s classics it was spoofing.) Bird’s mystery zigs and zags breathlessly as it probes multiple murders connected to a femme fatale-styled starlet in the imaginary city of Metropia; it’s consistently nifty, even when it feels less than original.
But it it’s never quite as funny as it should be, while its characters — in particular the eponymous hero, a smooth-talking P.I. voiced by Sam Rockwell — want for texture and soul. Audiences should happily speed along with them on their adventures, but after a fairly long two hours in their company, we don’t feel terribly attached to them. These aren’t fatal shortfalls: There are more than enough visual and sonic delights here to compensate. But they are surprising ones from Bird, whose animated work has been marked by zingy, non-snarky but adult-favoring wit and carefully seeded personal stakes.
In “Ray Gunn,” the titular pun — the protagonist’s name, but also his preferred weapon — is typical of the script’s quippery, getting more nods and smiles than outright giggles. The only character dynamic worth a damn, meanwhile, is that between Ray and his weary partner Eye-Ra (Tom Waits, the film’s most inspired casting coup, yielding its most affecting voice performance), who run a down-at-heel “discreet investigations” business from a creaky office being gradually stripped bare by repo men. Business is bad for Ray, in part because Eye-Ra is an alien cyclops, and human-alien collaboration is frowned upon in this world. (We never learn how the two species came to occupy the same planet, but the law regarding their separation is entrenched: Eye-Ra is barred from human hospitals, while aliens can only enter certain clubs as serving staff.)
It’s a heavy racial allegory to throw into an otherwise breezy enterprise, and the tone hiccups here and there as a result. With more than a nod to the identity politics that underpinned last year’s “KPop Demon Hunters,” however, it does eventually figure into the principal storyline — which, after a couple too many introductory false starts, kicks off when Ray is hired by Arnold (Bobby Cannavale), the lunkhead fourth husband of tempestuous pop megastar Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson) — to spy on her, though his motivations, of course, aren’t entirely what they seem. When people start showing up inconveniently dead and she’s thrust into scandal on the eve of her new album launch, Ray finds himself effectively babysitting her whilst carrying out his own snooping. But she’s a hard woman to pin down, in multiple senses; the more he knows about her, the less he knows about her, and naturally something sparks between them.
It’s an odd, perhaps youth-pandering detail that Venus, with her wasp-waisted silhouette and Veronica Lake hairdo, isn’t a Hollywood siren but a Dua Lipa-style electropop artist. (Her original songs are in fact written by Grammy winner Kimbra, of “Somebody That I Used to Know” fame, and they aren’t much in dialogue with Michael Giacchino’s wonderfully busy, brassy score, which makes no secret of its preferred era.) Nova’s particular brand of celebrity doesn’t really fit the film’s 2039-by-way-of-1939 mission statement, though it does allow Johansson a standout torch number in a more anti-period-appropriate vein — when Venus shows her true colors. Turns out she, like Bird, wants everything old to be new again, or everything new to be old again, or whatever the case may be.
She has a suitable partner on that front in the analog-inclined, trenchcoat-sporting Ray, but his image, too, doesn’t entirely add up: Rockwell voices him with jaded slyness, but he has the unlined face and swooshy hair of a Disney prince, rather than any stubbly Bogart gruffness. It’s just one reason why we can’t altogether warm to him — and why he doesn’t light up the center of Bird’s beautifully rendered dark-pastel dystopia. Rather like the man himself, “Ray Gunn” has slick, boundless energy and resourcefulness to spare, but that doesn’t quite amount to charm.
