Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.0

Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! Blu-ray Movie Review

Not everything is awesome, so some hot wheels will have to make do.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman October 3, 2014

It's pretty easy to turn something like, say, Barbie into a feature film or or two. There are at least human characters to work with, some semblance of a backstory, and with those things plenty of new adventures to create and explore. The same holds true for more guy-oriented toys that tend to lend themselves even more easily to feature films, like G.I. Joe and Transformers. But Hot Wheels? Die-cast miniature cars that move at the speed of a shove, tiny vehicles that look good at scale and earn heavy play time on tabletops and sandboxes and look pretty on collectors' shelves? Can those be turned into a movie? The Hot Wheels team took up the challenge and spit out Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome!, a sub-80 minute feature about four kids who chase down a hotshot driver in control of a piece of tech that could mean great racing...or great destruction. It's more focused on the human characters than it is the cars, but that's OK. Short of talking cars or something along the lines of The Lego Movie, there's really not much to do with a franchise based on toys that have their personality in a line, a shape, or a color, not in a mind, a heart, or a soul. So, how does the movie work with its focus on people as much as vehicles? Well enough, but only in spurts.

Team: assemble!

Gage (voiced by Grant George) is a mechanic working in Hilly Woodlands, thought to be the most boring place on Earth. He and Rhett (voiced by David Lodge) are best friends who work in a garage run by the somewhat esoteric and eccentric Larry (voiced by Faruq Tauheed). When Gage's and Rhett's rivals -- Wyatt (voiced by Nicolas Roye), a stunt man, and Brandon (voiced by Ben Diskin), a "gadget guy" -- arrive to cause trouble, Larry forces them together for a common cause: to track down Rev, a renegade driver who is in possession of Larry's "cloud engine," a device that runs on imagination and is capable of producing anything its wielder imagines (except for a giant walking marshmallow). Obviously, a device like that in the wrong hands could spell certain doom for mankind. Larry does all he can to transform them from four individually skilled racers into "Team Hot Wheels." They'll have to set their differences aside if they're to stand a chance against Rev and whatever his mind conjures up.

Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! definitely has its moments. The filmmakers have found a fairly creative avenue for bringing a toy car franchise to life beyond simply copying the Cars route. It's fast and fun, colorful and big, funny and engaging. But only to a point; more on that below. The basic plot allows the creativity to flow on the screen. It creates asceanrio in which anything and everything is fair game, whether hotrods attempting loop de loops or a giant Abraham Lincoln terrorizing the denizens of Hilly Woodlands. The film is filled with a wide variety of creative and fun characters and scenarios that are ridiculous at face value -- even in a movie like this -- but that work thanks to clever writing and solid visual execution. The film nicely blends a variety of styles to compliment the racing, grasping rather heavily onto a Voltron-style group of characters but mixing it up with so many elements it almost becomes a variety show, of sorts, which is critical considering the film's biggest downfall...

...which is its grossly repetitive nature. It seems that, once the film gets off the ground and the story is set into motion, it's a nonstop loop of the characters chasing down Rev, winding up crashed, returning to regroup, and going out only to crash again, regroup, and so on and so forth. While there's some variety to the action in its details, on the macro level it feels terribly tiring and unimaginative. The movie overextends itself by a good bit through its middle stretch that adds very little in terms of dramatic content. It becomes more about movement and excitement and less about structure and story, which may suit the target audience just fine but that will leave some adult viewers wishing for a little more depth. That's really the only major complaint. The animation is good (and it thankfully eschews that heavily digital, plastic look that absolutely ruins a movie like The Swan Princess: A Royal Family Tale), the voice acting is strong, and the movements, flash, and style will please younger viewers. It's a net win for the filmmakers and younger viewers alike who will more than likely be dazzled by the speed and the style that greets them with every new scene.

Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! offers a colorfully flashy 1080p transfer. Its palette is rich and lively, offering a wide array of colors including the blue, red, green, and yellow racer outfits, none of which are to be outdone by any number of supporting shades, like bright orange racetracks. Details are solid enough. The 1080p transfer brings out a nice little bit of image structure and stability. Fine object detail like tire treads and worn concrete look rather good in close-up shots. Lines, however, are frequently uneven and rough. Additionally, some light banding creeps in at times. This isn't as colorfully showy as Universal's most recent Barbie film (linked above) but it's still a bright, rainbow-like showcase of color that kids should enjoy.

Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! zooms onto Blu-ray with an aggressive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack. It can get fairly big and rather bold in its musical delivery, offering a rather steady stream of energized, upbeat notes that aggressively but effortlessly spill into the stage with good placement and a solid surround support element. Action effects are also big and throaty, with aggressive car engine sounds, zips and zooms, and other heavy racing and crashing elements. Likewise, minor support atmospherics are occasionally heard and enjoyed. Dialogue delivery is precise and focused, with a natural center balance and a quality sense of realistic reverberation within a cavernous location around the 37:50 mark. Overall, this is a strong, well balanced, and highly aggressive track from Universal.

Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! contains a brief making-of and a short music video.

• The Making of Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! (1080p, 5:28): A short look at the story, the Hot Wheels brand, transitioning the toys to film, story development, character design, and more.
• Music Video (1080p, 1:23): Team Hot Wheels official video.

Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! won't drive its way into the hearts of too many adults, but kids should be sufficiently dazzled by the speed and color on display. The movie works surprisingly well given what the filmmakers have to work with, and they squeeze out a pretty solid idea that allows their imaginations to run wild while still maintaining a classic Hot Wheels façade. Adults will bemoan the lack of a tighter story and more variety, but the younger ones will soak it up. Universal's Blu-ray release of Team Hot Wheels: The Origin of Awesome! delivers solid video, aggressive audio, and a couple of extras. Recommended to younger viewers.