Rating: ★★★☆☆
With the rise of streaming platforms, more and more childhood favorites are being rebooted, most recently “The Thundermans” have been added to this reboot mania. “The Thundermans Return” is a great homage to the series, even though its return is in the form of a movie. The movie was directed by Trevor Kirschner and is written by the original producer Jed Spingarn, who also worked on other shows like “Big Time Rush” or “The Adventures Of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius.” It is a superhero comedy that was released to Paramount+ on March 8.
The original show ran from 2013-2018, with four seasons in total. The show follows the Thundermans, a superhero family that has to live undercover from society. The family is composed of retired superheroes Hank (Chris Tallman) and Barb (Rosa Blasi), their oldest children, twins Max (Jack Griffo) and Phoebe (Kira Kosarin), their youngest children Nora (Addison Riecke), Billy (Diego Velazquez) and Chloe (Maya Le Clark). Together the family faces the struggles of living as civilians but also as undercover superheroes.
The movie follows the familiar family of superheroes who want to maintain healthy family relationships while trying to save the day. In the movie, a new group of villains disguised as superheroes sabotage their mission and get them kicked out of the T-Force, the group that Max and Phoebe have run since the end of the TV series, and land back in their previous home in Hiddenville.
I felt as if the movie could have done better if it had a higher budget and changed the marketing which was focused more on social media and the nostalgia factor. The main issue I had was that the movie felt rushed and all over the place in terms of story. The dialogue and interactions were aggressively average for a sitcom movie and the characters’ personalities weren’t similar to the show at all, for example, Phoebe is uptight and way too serious in the first scene, and Max is a social media star. Another detail that felt off was the glaring CGI issues which were used on the entire city in the first minute of the film, and later on, liquid mercury which didn’t even look real at all on screen.
Some of the greatest strengths of this movie included staying true to the main cast of characters and bringing every original character back for the reboot. It felt like I was watching an actual episode and the movie brought up a bunch of obscure references made in the show. It also used a ton of the same sets and costumes as the original program, which was nice and nostalgic for a long-time watcher of the show like myself. The sibling interactions were funny to watch, even if it was an average piece of material still, it gave some sense of reality to a movie that generally doesn’t have any reality to express.
If there was a reboot series announced I would watch that in a heartbeat because there’s a lot of plot missing or just made up to drag the movie on and my questions could probably be answered if there was a reboot in the making.
It was a nice watch even though the comedic moments weren’t in my taste, they could work for other, younger viewers. Overall, the movie has its ups and downs and I wish they could’ve done more with the movie and made it longer than the runtime of 70 minutes it has.
