I’ll say this for the two animated movies that Adam Sandler has now produced: Nobody else would’ve made them.
2002’s “Eight Crazy Nights” may not have been able to sustain the tongue-in-cheek “Hanukkah doesn’t completely suck!” energy of the gimmick song that inspired it (it turns out that idea only had enough oil to generate about three minutes of comedy, and not 76), but it’s still the only film about the Jewish holidays that I can name without reaching. And now, at a time when kids’ content is more generic than ever and Sandler’s Netflix deal has liberated him from whatever degree of quality control was once exerted upon the pre-streaming likes of “Pixels” and “Grown Ups 2,” he’s returning to the world of cartoons with a somewhat funny, perversely family-friendly musical-comedy about all of the ways that modern parents are making their children insane with anxiety.
On its face, “Leo” sounds like the sort of thing that a studio like Pixar or Illumination might be inclined to make in between sequels. It tells the story of a lazy 74-year-old lizard named Leonardo — Sandler, doing a septuagenarian riff on that one great voice he always does — whose carefree existence in the fifth-grade classroom where he’s served as a class pet since 1949 is turned upside down by the terrible discovery that the average tuatara only lives to be 75.
Leo decides to escape the terrarium that he shares with his cynical turtle friend Squirtle (Bill Burr) and spend his remaining months free in the wild, but when the classroom’s soulless new substitute Mrs. Malkin (Cecily Strong) forces each of the students to take the lizard home with them for the weekend as an exercise in personal responsibility, our reptilian friend realizes that all of these kids are in desperate need of his help.
In other hands, that set-up would surely lead to a series of teachable moments about the beauty of being yourself. In “Leo,” which is co-directed by Robert Marianetti, David Wachtenheim, and American hero Robert Smigel (of “Triumph the Insult Comic Dog” renown), it paves the way for Sandler to sing a vaguely Sondheim-like number about how annoying it is when little kids cry (sample lyric: “Don’t cry/it’s really annoying”).
Of course, Leo can only communicate with these kids because they understand what he’s saying, which feeds into what becomes the movie’s flimsy dramatic crux: Leo has somehow learned to speak English after being stuck in fifth grade for more than half a century like a bizarro universe Billy Madison (his biggest complaint about “Charlotte’s Web” being that “you have to hear about this delicious spider for days and you get hungry thinking about it”), but he tries to protect his secret by telling each student that he’s only sharing his secret with them because they’re extra special. Of course, what Leo’s really doing is protecting their feelings, which makes him guilty of the same parental impulse that’s messed all of these kids up in the first place.
Leo and Squirtle have seen enough 10-year-olds come through their classroom to know that every generation can be divided into the same basic characters (the popular mean girl, the eldest child whose parents never told them to shut up, the boy who always has Cheetos dust on his fingers, etc.), but the modern world seems to have amped up these archetypes to dangerous new levels. Helicopter parents were bad enough, but jittery Zane is forced to go to school with a sentient drone — a co-dependent flying robot that becomes the closest thing this movie has to a breakout star — who literally hovers over his shoulder during class and scares away potential friends. Leo’s seen a lot of kids who talk a lot to keep their insecurities quiet, but chatty Summer has to sing (she’s played by Sandler’s daughter Sunny).
Like all of the little ditties that pepper this movie, her almost Gilbert-and-Sullivan-speed number is cute and short and refreshingly devoid of any sort of “Let it Go”-sized aspirations. It’s hard to imagine that kids will be inspired to commit any of these tunes to memory (or beg to rewatch something that never proves to be even half as sticky as its lead character’s tongue), but as the father of a “Frozen”-pilled four-year-old I’m tempted to count that as a positive.
I’m less tempted to forgive “Leo” for being so ambivalent over which one of us it’s trying to entertain. My four-year-old might not be this film’s target audience (though its rendering of kindergarteners as mindless piranha-like maniacs amused me every time they showed up), but I’m hard-pressed to imagine who the target audience for this actually is. “Who is this for?” is a question that’s only asked by movies that aren’t working as well as they should, but it begs itself every few minutes in “Leo,” which can’t decide if it’s a movie for kids about parents, or a movie for parents about kids.
Smigel, Sandler, and Paul Sado’s episodic script rarely fires on quite enough cylinders to appeal to both crowds at the same time; most of the gags are too fifth-grade-funny to land for grown-ups (e.g. Ms. Malkin using “hug-off” spray to fend off overly affectionate students), and most of the messaging seems too focused on modern adult foibles and/or Leo’s imminent death from old age for kids to feel like it’s speaking to them. Like many of the parenting philosophies it mocks, “Leo” works better in theory than in practice. And like many of the children those parenting philosophies churn out, it fails to realize its full potential.
Still, there’s no denying that Leo himself is a delightful old weirdo — the best movie lizard this side of Rango, despite being rendered with a fraction of the same artistry — and that the movie around him gets a lot of mileage from the contrast between its manic pace and his molasses-slow mannerisms. The characters he meets along the way might be a little stale (Jason Alexander voices a rich Dr. Zizmor type who tries to buy his daughter’s problems away, which inspires Leo to teach her the heartrending lesson that the other kids at school low-key hate her), but Leo is such a scaly little freak that his disgust for these people is as reliably amusing as his tendency to glitch out whenever anything catches him by surprise.
Of course, the biggest surprise in store for the pet tuatara is that he’s about to learn the same lesson as the anxiety-addled kids he tries to help: We’re all born into our own hellish terrariums, but there’s real freedom in being heard by the people (and class pets) around you.
Grade: C+
“Leo” is now streaming on Netflix.
