Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

Spies in Disguise Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 12, 2020

The animators at Blue Sky came up with an unexpected “superstar” in the form of Scrat, the acorn hoarding kinda sorta squirrel like creature in the Ice Age: 5 Movie Collection. Scrat became so popular after the first Ice Age, in fact, that he (it?) became Blue Sky’s mascot, featured prominently in both a series of appealing shorts as well as the film’s production masthead. Blue Sky may have another extremely odd star waiting in the wings, with an emphasis on wings, since this bizarre creature, known as Crazy Eyes in Spies in Disguise, may be a pigeon by definition, but is in many ways simply a flying Scrat. Spies in Disguise actually has a whole flock of pigeons marauding through its story, since the central conceit of this unabashedly silly romp is that a superspy named Lance Sterling (voiced by Will Smith) is turned into a pigeon courtesy of a “Q wannabe” named Walter Beckett (Tom Holland), a kind of hapless shlub who has toiled in the weapons department of the spy agency where Lance is the big man on or off campus. Walter, however, has a pacifist side, and so he keeps inventing weapons that tend to get the job done without creating untold carnage, something that actually irritates the heck out of Lance, who wants to blow the bad guys up, no questions asked. Spies in Disguise doesn’t have a lot of narrative momentum, opting for some contrived plot mechanics that put Lance (in bird form) and Walter on the run from an agency cop named Marcy Kappel (Rashida Jones), who is under the mistaken assumption that Lance has stolen a super secret drone technology that kind of feeds off the atmosphere and so is unstoppable if it’s programmed to go after something and destroy it. Of course, Lance has already figured out that an arch villain named Killian (Ben Mendelsohn) not only has the drone, but has scanned Lance’s face and is able to morph himself into Lance’s form, a disguise that allows Killian to infiltrate various top secret locations and, well, blow things up without asking any questions, in a behavior which is kind of ironically exactly like the real Lance.

Walter is actually initially introduced as a kid working on a series of inventions that he wants his police woman mother to utilize in order to keep her safe. That little plot point may plant a seed in some more prescient viewers who may wonder how long it is before Walter’s Mom is going to meet some horrible fate on her job. It’s perhaps a bit surprising, then, when instead of detailing just such a tragedy, the film segues forward a decade and a half or so to find Walter as an adult working in the gadgets division of the spy agency (which is not to say that any prescient feeling is misplaced in the grand scheme of things). And in fact, once the film does segue it appears for a while at least that Walter is most definitely “only” a supporting character to Lance.

That changes soon enough, but only after a heated interchange between Lance and Walter where Lance ends up firing Walter, a running gag throughout the film. But ultimately Lance is of course in need of Walter’s new “stealth” technology after Lance is accused of stealing the drone, only Walter doesn’t exactly let Lance know that the technology is one that will transform him into a pigeon. Now that is certainly one of those so- called “high concepts” that may lead some jaded analysts to infer that the “high” part may have been with regard to controlled substances on the part of the writing team, but joking aside, this was evidently based on a short called Pigeon Impossible , featuring the same basic setup (meaning maybe those writers were “altered”), which is unfortunately not included in the supplements on this release.

With a premise that patently goofy, it’s really hard to give a penetrating, sober analysis of a film that just kind of careens along on its own manic energy. There is a lot of noise and fury here signifying relatively little, but I have to say Spies in Disguise made me laugh fairly heartily on several occasions (one of which admittedly might be limited to me, since it involved a series of jokes revolving around the name “Jeff”). You’ve seen the “emotional arc” (if it can even be called that) of this film in countless other offerings, both animated and live action, where a mismatched pair find that they’re better together as a team than on their own, but the whole gonzo central section of this film where Lance is a pigeon struck me as kind of deliriously funny a lot of the time. His adoptive "flock", which includes that aforementioned star in waiting Crazy Eyes, is mined for quite a bit of visual humor throughout in much the same vein that groups of more bizarre supporting characters have been in other Blue Sky enterprises.

The animators have done a nice job with character design and an overall aesthetic that is really colorful and eye popping a lot of the time. Voice work is also very engaging, with good supporting turns by Reba McIntire as Lance’s (and by extension Walter’s) superior at the spy agency and a few nice moments with Rachel Brosnahan as Walter’s mother.

Note: My colleague Brian Orndorf was considerably less taken with this film than I was. You can read Brian's thoughts here.

Spies in Disguise Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Spies in Disguise is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. This is a winning looking presentation all the way around, with some really wonderfully vivid uses of color, appealing (if kind of derivative of other Blue Sky efforts) character design, and some nice attention paid to textures, something that comes across very well in terms of consistent fine detail levels on this Blu-ray disc. There are some patently goofy effects throughout this film, including the manic sequence where Lance first transforms into a pigeon, which has all sorts of hallucinatory and, later, "point of view" shots which some may find as hilarious as I did. Other sight gags include a gadget of Walter's that works like a ray gun of sorts but which turns its targets into rubbery melted versions of themselves, or a kind of sticky pink goo Walter calls Serious String (as opposed to Silly String), and some of the texturing in these moments can really look very inventive.

By the way, this is yet another animated feature originally released theatrically in some markets in 3D, but which is evidently only being granted "flat" presentations in 1080p and 4K UHD, a phenomenon I just mentioned a couple of days ago in our Ne Zha Blu-ray review. There are a number of fun "dimensional" effects in this presentation which seem to have been designed with 3D in mind, like Walter's "protective glitter" (watch the film and you'll understand) exploding supposedly out of the frame. Things may not be traditionally dimensional here in terms of an actual 3D presentation, but I found the delineation of spatial planes to still be excellent even in this flat presentation.

Spies in Disguise Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

I'm not giving myself any "wiggle room" for the 4K UHD presentation's Dolby Atmos track (which I haven't heard as of the writing of this review), but I don't think even many ardent audiophiles will find much if anything to complain about with regard to the 1080p Blu-ray's DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 track, and for my money it rates a solid 5.0 on its own merits. From the first moments of the opening sequence, there's both consistent engagement of the surrounds, but also really fun discrete channelization and boisterous bursts of LFE to keep things rumbling. The film has a number of standout moments in the big action showdowns, including some marauding drones (which will be fun to hear in Dolby Atmos, I'm sure), but there are ambient environmental sounds (interior and exterior) that are regularly utilized to fill in the background. Dialogue, effects and score are all rendered with excellent fidelity and wide dynamic range.

Spies in Disguise Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Infiltrating Blue Sky Studios (1080p; 9:11) offers Trinitee as a tour guide of sorts offering a behind the scenes look at the studio and some of the creative team who worked on the picture.


• The Top Secret Guide to Gadgets (1080p; 3:57) takes a look at some of the accoutrements the agents sport in this film.


• "Then There Were Two" Music Video (1080p; 3:24)


• "Freak of Nature" Music Video (1080p; 3:45)


• Making the Soundtrack "Then There Were Two" (1080p; 1:24) offers some brief background on the writing and production with Anderson .Paak and Mark Ronson.


• Making the Soundtrack "Freak of Nature" (1080p; 1:30) does much the same service for this tune, this time with Mark Ronson and The Last Artful, Dodgr.


• Gallery

  Color Keys and Moment Paintings (1080p; 1:03)

  
  

  Character Designs (1080p; 1:23)

  
  

  Locations (1080p; 00:48)

  
  

  Props and Gadgets Concept Art (1080p; 00:58)

  Note: All of the galleries offer either Manual Advance or Auto Advance options. The timings above are for the Auto Advance option.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1:43)


• Super Spy Mode can be found under the Play Menu and offers about sixteen extra minutes of featurettes and PiP content.

Spies in Disguise Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If you simply surrender to this film's very peculiar sense of lunacy, it may provide you as many laughs as it did me. In revisiting this a second time kind of vicariously vis a vis taking screenshots for this review, I actually once again laughed a couple of times simply thinking about the frankly stupid premise this film exploits. That said, I'm one of those guys who likes stupid comedy, so of course individual mileage may vary. Technical merits are excellent, and if you're fan of dunderheaded humor like I am, Spies in Disguise comes Recommended.