Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie Has Enough Wit To Be A Charming Diversion

Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants books have been making kid readers across the planet crack up for decades now and yours truly was certainly a major fan of the books when he was a kid. The tales of George and Harold and their own superhero Captain Underpants were these giddy tomes filled with potty humor that made them not only feel different from typical kids literature but also made their humor sensibilities right at home with the kind of humor the typical adolescent child finds funny. Because, really, who under the age of 10 doesn't find the word "Poopypants" utterly hilarious beyond description?


Adapting those books to the big screen seems like a daunting task despite having solid source material to serve as groundwork for such a motion picture simply because the various Captain Underpants books are so breezy and unabashedly immature it's hard to imagine that tone being able to sustain a feature length movie. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie undertakes the task of trying to bring the characters and world of these books to the big screen and while the movie has some obvious problems trying to sustain even an 89 minute long running time, the results are....actually not bad? Even quite funny at times? Huh. This really is the year of the superhero movie I guess.

So the main premise of this Captain Underpants movie, hewing super closely to the books, is that two fourth graders George Beard (Kevin Hart) and Harold Hutchins (Thomas Middleditch) are the best of friends who spend hours making comic books together that star their own newly created superhero, Captain Underpants and the two also are notorious for pulling off elaborate practical jokes on their teachers to help cheer up their fellow classmates at their incredibly depressing elementary school. These antics do not amuse their principal, Mr. Krupp (Ed Helms), a guy who sucks the joy out of any situation. But one fateful day, just as Mr. Krupp is going to sign papers that would separate George and Harold from ever sharing classes together, George uses a hypnotizing ring he got out of a cereal box on Mr. Krupp that actually succeeds in hypnotizing the principal.

With Mr. Krupp at their mental beck and call, George and Harold decide to transform their grouchy school principal into none other than Captain Underpants himself. Now, whenever someone snaps their fingers, Krupp will transform into this near-naked superhero much to George and Harold's endless amusement. It's a good thing Captain Underpants now exists in the real world since there happens to be a new German accented villain called Professor Poopypants (Nick Kroll) in town whose looking to eradicate laughter from the entire world and maybe, just maybe, Captain Underpants could be the one to stop him and save the day.

All of that basic plot stuff can't quite a movie that starts the credits at about the 80 minute mark, with extended sequences where George and Harold use Captain Underpants disguised as Mr. Krupp to improve their school by way of re-opening the arts programs and performing a whoopee cushion symphony feeling like particularly extraneous scenes that aren't funny enough to justify their existence. There's a fair share of gags in Nicholas Stoller's screenplay that also fail to elicit big laughs in other parts of the movie and that same script can't make supporting characters played by Jordan Peele and Kristen Schaal much more than one-note caricatures.

That having been said, that same script actually manages to create some quite an exuberant tone and atmosphere that results in a much larger amount of jokes that hit the sweet spot of generating laughs. Plus, the more sincere aesthetic of the project is pretty charming all things considered, there really isn't a cynical or mean-spirited bone in either the lead characters or the movie itself's desire to make people laugh. Some of those jokes found in Captain Underpants come from an admirable willingness to embrace other venues of visual storytelling, with hand-drawn animation showing up on a few separate occasions, the Flip-O-Rama gimmick from the books coming back briefly and there's even an entire sequence rendered solely in sock puppets. How can ya not giggle at sock puppets?

Under the direction of director David Soren, the computer animation that makes up the majority of the movie also differentiates itself from other DreamWorks Animation fare nicely, replicating the look of Dav Pilkey's illustrations from the book and creating its own visual style in the process. That unique approach to computer animation lends the movie some unique gags that had me chortling while the voice actors also provide plenty of amusement. Typically, I do not care for adult actors playing adolescent characters in animated movies, it's usually more distracting than anything else but Kevin Hart and Thomas Middleditch actually do a great job with the characters of George and Harold, creating wholly new personalities in their voice work instead of constantly reminding one of their work in other projects. Those two are an absolute hoot in Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, which is an overlong (even at 89 minutes) motion picture that isn't super-extraordinary but does end up being decent family fare that had me laughing more often than I expected.