Former superhero Jack Shepard, also known as Captain Zoom is called back to work to transform an unlikely group of ragtag kids into a new generation of superheroes. At a privacy academy, he trains Dylan, a 17-year-old boy who can turn invisible; Summer, a 16-year-old girl with telekinetic powers; Tucker, a 12-year-old boy with the power to enlarge any part of his body; and Cindy, a 6-year-old girl with super strength.What went wrong with this movie? The main reasons the movie is a stinker can be traced to the script. We have four youths on the team Allen is leading, and we learn next to nothing about them. They are pretty interchangeable. The rest of the characters are poorly written as well. The bad guy of the movie doesnt appear until the last 15 minutes of the movie leaving no time to develop him.

There are a bunch of new characters here; Forky, a newly made toy struggling to cope with his sentience, Duke Caboom, Canada’s greatest stuntman voiced by everyone’s favorite actor right now Keanu Reeves, Ducky and Bunny, the fluffy duo brought to life by the comedy duo Key and Peele. These characters are plenty of fun to watch and each of them have their own unique charms. They are excellent characters and an appropriate amount of screen time is dedicated to each of them. That said, this means that the characters we have been familiar with (Jessie, Rex, Mr. Potatohead, etc.) are sort of given the backseat. It would have been great if they had been given a more central part in the action but it’s understandable to manage the time to give to the newcomers.The story itself is beautiful and not as dark as Toy Story 3, with Lotso essentially transforming the kids’ center into some sort of prison camp. It deals with questions of what it means to be a toy and what a toy dreams life should be. I feel it to be somewhat more existential questions than I had expected, especially with the arrival of Forky, a newly created being brought to life from trash. Perhaps with age comes the boldness to ask more challenging questions. This is after all, a 24-year-old franchise.