Movie Thoughts: Pets on a Train (2025)

 

• Released: July 2nd, 2025
• Directed by: Benoît Daffis, Jean-Christian Tassy
• Running time: 1h 39min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

A group of animal get stuck on a runaway train and a crash seems imminent. Will they be able to get to the locomotive and pull the emergency brake before it's too late?

My Thoughts

I didn't have particularly high hopes for this movie going in, but, honestly, after having watched it... Yeah, I liked it. It's not amazing or anything, but this is solid. 

I think this movie has two main draws that made it really enjoyable for me: the characters and the action. For the first point, I just genuinely found myself being pretty invested in quite a few of the characters here, though not every one was a hit. Particularly Falcon, Maggie, Rex and Rico are just enjoyable characters and I think they were all written rather well. Sure, they may not be the most unique characters out there and do kinda fall into archetypes sometimes, but that doesn't change the fact that they're all pretty well-written and not just one-note and boring. They do have their own mini-arcs and roles to play in the story.

The action I also thought was surprisingly solid in this movie. The animals get stuck on the runaway train pretty early on in the movie and from that point on there's a lot of smaller action scenes as the animals have to get to the locomotive, all the while they're being hit by various obstacles like faulty coaches, fires, a badger trying to stop them, a ramshackle bridge the train has to cross, etc. And all of these scenes do have decently high stakes and they do get pretty intensive sometimes. Sure, nobody dies or anything, but there's still quite a few exciting scenes here. But thankfully the movie isn't a non-stop action scene, either; there are spaces to breathe here. 

The humor also was surprisingly fun sometimes. Okay, yeah, not every joke lands, but I found myself chuckling a few times throughout the movie, so that was a nice surprise.

If I do have a criticism with the movie, it's that I think it does maybe have too many characters. If you look at the poster, you can see that there's quite a few of them, and that's by far not even all of them. Sure, not every character has a huge role to play and the movie does thankfully mostly keep its focus where it should be (with Falcon, Maggie, Rex and the antagonist, Hans), but there's still a lot of side characters to the point it is honestly a bit overkill at times. And since most of the side characters end up being pretty one-note and simple (with a few exceptions like Rico), I honestly feel the amount of these secondary characters could've been cut down a bit. It's not a huge issue because the movie does keep its focus, but again, there are a lot of characters to keep track of and genuinely I can't remember the names of half of them because there's just so damn many.

I guess the villain in this also wasn't amazing or anything. Hans the badger (who is surprisingly big for a European badger, by the way. He's almost like, bear-sized) is just kind of a standard bad guy. He does have a past with Rex the police dog, but all of this is told to us and never shown, so I think a flashback here could've maybe made him work a little better. Hans as is is just kinda generic as a villain.  

Another positive point though: The movie surprisingly has a bit of heart to it. Sure, it's not amazing or anything, but I got surprisingly a bit emotional. There's some basic stuff that works well enough, such as Rex bonding with the other animals and the relationship between Maggie and the girl who owns her, but I was really hit emotionally by the relationship between Falcon/Maurice the raccoon and Rico the pigeon. The movie starts out with Falcon boasting proudly about his "raised by falcons" identity and making himself seem greater than he really is, but then over the course of the movie he ends up embracing his identity as a raccoon raised by a pigeon (Rico), and truly becomes great as he becomes the hero who saves the day. I don't know, that part really hit me in the feels when I wasn't expecting it to. I also just like Rico, he's a likable character so to see Falcon/Maurice go from just kinda ignoring him to truly embracing him as his father was really sweet.

So yeah, not a fantastic movie or anything, but I think it's neat. It has heart, it has some fun comedy, it has good characters, the animation and character designs are good, and the action scenes are also really enjoyable. Do recommend this one if you have the opportunity to give it a watch.