The fun’s just beginning: ‘Toy Story 4’

At the dawn of his acting career Keanu Reeves took a lot of flak, some of it deserved, for the  surfer dude notes that his voice caressed as if they were an admirer’s hands. Then he figured out after Speed that he needed to accept scripts whose dialogue made Clint Eastwood parts look like Ralph Richardson’s. As Duke Caboom in Toy Story 4, His Keanuness at last has a part in which the ridiculousness is the point: a generously mustached Canadian motorcyclist figure still haunted by how he failed to impress his flaxen-haired owner during the Pierre Trudeau years. Caboom still sounds stiff and pompous, as if still married to an ideal that everyone else knew he’d failed at matching. And he remains stiff and pompous when the other toys use terrible puns like “Here I Canada!” or slogans like “The Canuck with all the luck.”

Keanu (what, you think I’d call him Reeves? Are you Duke Caboom?) has had a helluva summer, thanks in large part to his delicious starring role in John Wick 3: The Dogs Kick Ass. Tangled up in one too many rescue missions and “meanwhile back at Justice League headquarters” segues, Toy Story 4 isn’t at that level; but like its three predecessors it caught me offguard by the level of pathos it unearthed from a fact of life with which children have wrestled for centuries: how do our toys feel when we two-time them? This time around owner Andy is long gone, a college freshman off to play with bongs and girls, presumably. Young Bonnie inherits the crateload of toys led by cowpoke Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), the child of the sort of liberal dad who raises no moral objection to wearing close-toed leather sandals. Moved by Bonnie’s reluctance to start kindergarten orientation, Woody sneaks into her bag and, to encourage her during arts and crafts, puts a spork on her table. The creative Bonnie winds a pipe cleaner around the handle, attaches a blue Play-Doh smile and wooden pallets on which she writes her name, and, well, presto change-o! Meet Forky.

Amusing, hectic, and expert at ladling pathos (Randy Newman’s kept at a minimum, thank the maker), Toy Story 4 should’ve been subtitled The Adventures of Forky. A road trip in an RV becomes the MacGuffin for an expedition that leads the Woody gang into an antique shop ruled by one of those terrifying Ike-era talking dolls, this one named Gabby Gabby, with the help of a praetorian guard comprised of ventriloquist dummies — one of the film’s dafter touches, for those kinds of dummies, like clowns, freak the hell out of us. Toy Story 4 also reunites Woody and Bo Peep (Annie Potts), a toy who prefers her independence.

It is redundant at this point to praise the virtuosity of the Pixar animators, but on Toy Story 4 they achieve a level of precision that, in the hands of a good teacher, would show a younger generation of audiences how deep focus works. In Pixar’s hands nothing onscreen is peripheral. I was taken with a chase sequence behind a chest of drawers in which a long forgotten surge protector has just the right layers of crust; we have several around the house with similarly ignominious fates. So why didn’t I love the movie? The aforementioned pathos is in places like its own scrim of dust. It also wouldn’t hurt to lose a few toys, a decision which no doubt leads to ethical quagmires: would you lose the Potato Heads or Wallace Shawn’s underused Rex? Give Toy Story 4 this, though: its ending suggests yet another chapter, this one with Duke Caboom by Woody’s side.

GRADE: B+