Today’s quick review: The Guardian Brothers. As human faith in the spirit world fades, Yu Lei (Edward Norton) sets out to free the Nian, an imprisoned evil spirit, for the humans and the spirits to unite against. His brother Shen Tu (Dan Fogler) travels to the human world to try to stop him, but he soon gets sidetracked helping Rain (Bella Thorne) and her mother Luli (Nicole Kidman) save their family’s soup shop from closing down.
The Guardian Brothers is a Chinese animated family fantasy comedy. The story follows two brother spirits as they reconnect with the human world, which has largely moved on. The movie juggles between two subplots: Yu Lei’s misguided efforts to release an ancient evil in the hope of revitalizing faith in the spirit world, and Rain and Luli’s attempts to run the soup shop left to them by Luli’s mother.
The Guardian Brothers quickly runs into issues with its delivery. On the comedic side, the movie takes a scattershot approach. Many of its gags have characters acting goofy for no particular reason, and the movie crams in as many jokes, stray lines of dialogue, and musical cues as possible without worrying about how to make them fit. The result is a flurry of half-hearted jokes that are poorly conceived, poorly timed, and have no follow-through.
On the story side, the problems are subtler. The plot suffers from the same abruptness as the humor, introducing ideas as a matter of convenience and rarely putting in the work to set up its conflict. The premise of the story works just fine, and it could have been a touching tale about reconciling change and tradition. But the story structure is too disjointed to make this work, with few meaningful connections between the two subplots.
Even with all of these issues, The Guardian Brothers earns points for trying to tell its own story. The movie spends time laying out the rules of the spirit world and how the humans’ loss of faith has left the spirits without purpose. The fight to save Luli’s restaurant is not the most compelling story, but it could have resonated if given the right treatment. The Guardian Brothers does not achieve its goals, but it does have clear goals in mind.
How much you get out of The Guardian Brothers will come down to taste, but it has enough drawbacks that the average viewer will want to skip it. Plot issues, misguided comedy, and a clunky dub all keep it from capitalizing on its best ideas, while generally weak craftsmanship keeps it from having the same baseline appeal as its competitors. There is something here for a viewer with the right sense of humor, but most would be better off elsewhere.
For a more heartfelt animated adventure that explores Chinese folklore in a modern setting, try Over the Moon. For a more action-oriented story about a group of otherworldly protectors, try Rise of the Guardians.
[5.5 out of 10 on IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4788934/). I give it a 4.5 for some new ideas held back by pervasive flaws in their execution.