Movie Thoughts: Son of Bigfoot (2017)

• Released: 26 July 2017
• Directed by: Jeremy Degruson, Ben Stassen
• Running time: 1 h 32 min
• Rating 2.5/5

Synopsis

A boy discovers he's half Sasquatch and must now protect his father and the forest from an evil company trying to experiment on him.

My Thoughts

A movie that peaked my interest when it came out, but I never ended up watching. The teaser art looks...semi-decent? So let's check it out.

The story is nothing really all that original. The classic environmental "protect the creatures (Bigfoot included) and forest from the evil company". I guess it has the twist to it with the company wanting to use Bigfoot for hair experiments rather than dissecting him or something, but that's really where the originality ends if you ask me.

The characters are somewhat decent. Adam is standard but not a horribly written protagonist or anything. He does learn from his mistakes and does love both his parents a lot. Bigfoot (seriously, I forgot his actual name, if he even had one) seems like a pretty cool dad. The animal sidekicks are...honestly, just that. They're mostly there for comic relief but they're not that funny, but they're luckily not annoying, either. 

The villain is honestly one of my biggest gripes of the movie. He's boring. Ungodly boring. Why does he want his hair experiments on Bigfoot? To sell people natural-growing hair and get rich. Geez, how original.

The movie looks pretty competent, though. Like with The Queen's Corgi, another movie by the same studio, some of the character designs are a bit eh, but overall they look decent and the animation is good, though not Pixar-level quality, obviously.

My main gripe with this movie aside from the villain is honestly that it kinda just misses the emotional beats. It tries to go for this heartfelt story, but I never once felt sad. I don't know whether it's the tone of the scenes or something, but they just didn't work for me. Each time they tried to have a sad or bonding moment in the film I just felt completely neutral. And that's not because I don't care about the characters, Adam and his father are decent enough characters you do root for, but just because the way the scenes were executed didn't work for me.

So, overall, a decent-looking movie with decent characters, but really nothing more than that. The villain is weak and the emotional moments are for me personally very hit-and-miss.