Luis & the Aliens (2018)

(On Cable TV, June 2020) For movie reviewers with wide-ranging tastes, there’s always a tendency to praise the underdog, and the family animation movie genre is getting crowded with alternatives to Pixar, Dreamworks and Illumination. Luis & the Aliens is one of those lower-budgeted family comedies, clearly not up to the example set by the genre’s front-runners but still able to deliver a story in its own way. Alas, reviewers would be wasting their time trying to pretend that this is a hidden gem: only the less demanding kids will be particularly interested in the B-grade comedy with stock morals and underwhelming material about grotesque shape-shifting aliens trying to pass as human. The writing isn’t necessarily much better, with ordinary dialogue and an unbelievable caricature of a distracted father (no character sympathy there!) While the story does come together in the end, it does so with few surprises and few memorable moments. Luis & the Aliens is not terrible but it’s not particularly good either. Maybe see it once you’ve seen nearly everything else.