Leo Review: Adam Sandler Heads Up A Winning New Animated Film
It's a little humbling to realize that Adam Sandler is in his mid-fifties, just a few years away from the milestone birthday of 60 years old. Sandler is all but enshrined as a comedy icon, having recently received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and being known to one generation as a mischievous part of "Saturday Night Live" and to another for his roles in animated films like "Hotel Transylvania." Mortality and legacy are — at least somewhat — a part of Sandler's latest project, an animated film from Netflix (where he's primarily worked for the last few years). The film is "Leo," which coasts on irresistible charm even when the plot is a bit light. Though "Leo" is perhaps not the most groundbreaking animated film of the year, its gentle tone and emotion mixed with some standard anarchic gags from the Happy Madison school of comedy work in its favor.
Sandler provides the voice of the title character, a 74-year-old lizard who's always made his home in a fifth-grade classroom in Central Florida and has become accustomed to not having to fend for himself. He and his best friend, Squirtle the Turtle (Bill Burr), are used to business as usual with the fifth-graders who enter and leave their room each year. The story kicks in when two things happen: first, the current teacher takes her maternity leave and is replaced by a fierce substitute (Cecily Strong); and second, Leo learns that lizards like him only live to 75, meaning he's staring death in the face. Though Leo wants to travel to the Everglades to live out his retirement, the substitute's new rule of making a student take him home once a week leads to him unexpectedly connecting with the students by revealing he can talk to them and help them grow and mature.
"Leo" sounds a bit more saccharine than it winds up being, in large part because while this is very much a family film, it is also still a film from Happy Madison Productions. Sandler's longtime collaborator Robert Smigel co-directed and co-wrote "Leo," as well as writing all of the film's original songs. Yes, though we hear the voices of Burr and Sandler before we see their characters, it becomes immediately clear that "Leo" is an animated musical (and Sandler, even while doing a requisite goofy voice as Leo, does sing a couple of numbers too). While none of the songs in "Leo" are as memorable as those from other recent animated films, or even a classic "SNL" song of Sandler's about school, "Lunchlady Land," they contribute to the charm offensive within the story.
An ode to teaching
"Leo," like a number of recent animated films, doesn't have a terribly fearsome villain, and even the antagonistic substitute Mrs. Malkin isn't so scary once we get to know her. But the story — Sandler and Paul Sado co-wrote with Smigel — carefully and quickly sidesteps the notion of Leo escaping his elementary school home to live in the natural world. (In one mid-film setpiece, Leo tries to note to one of the kids that animals don't always love being locked up, but is interrupted before he can get his point across, as if the film doesn't quite want to grapple with its lead character being more comfortable as a pet.) Instead, "Leo" reveals itself to be something of a lighthearted ode to the value of teaching. Though the script makes some not-so-subtle commentary about helicopter parenting (in one case almost literally, as one of the students is constantly followed by a drone to ensure his parents know what he's up to), "Leo" is as much about the life lessons the eponymous lizard tries to impart as it is about emphasizing the value that a good teacher can create for a set of students.
Of course, as the impact that Leo has on the kids in his classroom is a big part of the story, it's a bit challenging to think about "Leo" the film in context with some of Sandler's other animated efforts. Though the "Hotel Transylvania" franchise is different in many ways, the real surprise here is that the tone feels a bit more low-key than the madcap humor and style of the Halloween-inspired series. It's not automatically a bad thing, but "Leo" starts and ends in a lower-level gear of energy, roused a bit more than the elderly lizard at the center of the story but never with the same speedy urgency of the Genndy Tartakovsky-directed films. Just as Leo is content to move at a slower pace, so too is the film.
"Leo" is, among many other things, a very cute animated movie. It's charming (and its ensemble cast, with plenty of real kids, a couple of whom are part of the Sandler family) and a fine addition to the vast stable of Netflix Original animated films. Each piece of the story, from the self-aware songs to the commentary on modern parenting and technology, works well enough without ever feeling remarkable or transcendent. Charm doesn't make an animated film perfect, but as "Leo" proves, it can make for an entertaining enough time for the whole family.
/Film Rating: 7 out of 10