Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)
★★★ — Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)
Here's the thing about Wallace and Gromit: they've never needed much. A wedge of Wensleydale, a dodgy invention, and Gromit's long-suffering eyebrow raise. That's the formula. And the best entries in Aardman's beloved series understood that instinctively. So when I sat down with my young one to watch the long-awaited Vengeance Most Fowl, I was genuinely excited. Feathers McGraw is back. The penguin. The cold, beady-eyed genius in the red rubber glove. What's not to love?
Quite a bit, as it turns out. Not in any catastrophic way, but in the quiet, nagging way of a film that keeps nudging you when you were perfectly happy just sitting still.
The setup is promising enough. Feathers is back with a diamond heist on his agenda, and the old adversarial tension crackles briefly to life. But the film doesn't trust that tension to carry the thing. Instead, it floods the screen with garden gnomes. Chatty, relentless, incessantly chirping garden gnomes. And they don't just appear. They swarm. They chatter. They clog up every quiet corner of a film that desperately needed some quiet corners. Where Feathers McGraw was terrifying precisely because he said nothing, these gnomes never shut up.
The animation, I'll grant, is absolutely impeccable. Every woolly jumper fibre, every bit of plasticine fingerprint and expressive squish is lovingly rendered. Gromit's face remains one of the great achievements in wordless performance, animated or otherwise. There's real craft here, and I don't want to wave that away. When a Rube Goldberg contraption kicks in or the camera lingers on some absurd background detail, you feel the hours of painstaking work behind every frame. Aardman hasn't lost the ability to make this stuff. They've just lost, slightly, the restraint that once made it sing.
I've been a fan of this series for as long as I can remember. I think A Close Shave (1995) is close to perfect, and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) remains a genuine joy. What those films understood is that the comedy breathes. There are pauses. There's space between the gags for the characters to just exist together. The duo's relationship, Wallace bumbling and oblivious, Gromit patient and devoted, works best when the film steps back and lets it land. Here, the plot meanders and the gags pile up faster than they land. Busier isn't funnier. That's not an opinion, that's just maths.
Watching it with a kid made the pacing problems undeniable. When a young child starts fidgeting mid-scene, that's useful data. It's not a damning verdict on its own, kids are fickle, we all know that. But when I was fidgeting too, and catching myself glancing at the runtime, something's clearly gone a bit wrong.
There are genuine laughs in here. I don't want to be unfair. And it's lovely just to have these two back on screen in a new story. But charm isn't about scale or spectacle. It's about heart, and silence, and knowing when to let the moment breathe rather than papering over it with noise. The gnomes are noise. Entertaining noise, occasionally. But noise.
Three stars. A competent, visually gorgeous outing that proves the craft is still very much alive at Aardman. I just wish someone in the edit had been a little more ruthless, pulled back the gnomes, given Feathers McGraw more room to menace, and trusted the audience to find Wallace and Gromit funny without all the scaffolding. We always have before.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-03-20
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Kids · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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More from Nick Park: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) · A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008) · A Grand Day Out (1989) · A Close Shave (1995)
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