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Paws of Fury, review: the child-friendly Blazing Saddles remake nobody asked for

Inane: Paws of Fury
Inane: Paws of Fury

Here is the latest corker to have been spat out by the great cosmic fruit machine behind third-tier children’s entertainment: a (whir, whir) remake of Blazing Saddles, set in (whir, whir) feudal Japan, and featuring the voices of (whir, whir) Michael Cera and Ricky Gervais.

Paws of Fury is precisely as inane as its premise makes it sound – think Kung Fu Panda, but blander – though it has been cobbled together with a certain honest doltishness that tends to play well with its young target audience.

What’s more, its debt to Mel Brooks’s mighty 1974 comic western isn’t merely conceded but officially rubber-stamped. Brooks himself makes a grandfatherly vocal cameo as the diminutive shogun, while the screenplay is partly credited to all five of Blazing Saddles’ writers, including the late Richard Pryor, whose unexpected posthumous move into family-friendly CG animation has some novelty value at least.

The racial tensions satirised by Brooks’s film have been swapped for the age-old enmity between cats and dogs: here a canine samurai called Hank, voiced by Cera, becomes the protector of an all-feline town which has been earmarked for demolition by Gervais’s scheming vizier Ika Chu. (Yes, he’s erroneously referred to as Pikachu within 10 or so minutes.)

Gervais’s performance has a low-stakes flippancy that's an instantly dreadful fit for this moustache-twirling, Iznogoud-like role, and his vocal presence here feels like a bone preemptively lobbed to bored parents. So too does Samuel L Jackson’s appearance as Jimbo (as in Yojimbo), a fallen samurai whose slurred delivery of the pun “ninjas with attitude” almost made me fall out of my seat.

Jimbo is roughly the Gene Wilder to Hank’s Cleavon Little: a surly mentor with a heavy catnip habit who irritably schools his hapless student in the bushido code. Hank himself winkingly refers to these sequences as training montages, while other plot developments are heralded with various spins on “Ah, this must be the part of the movie when…” – a joke format which does not, in fact, render the dearth of fresh ideas here any less exhausting.

There are also numerous modified versions of some of Blazing Saddles’ famous comic set pieces, including the horse-punching entrance of the brutish Mongo (now Sumo, a giant warrior voiced by Djimon Hounsou), the assembling of the evil army, the attack on the fake town, and of course the iconic crescendo of flatulence, which now provides a backing track to one of Gervais’s evil speeches. But most feel like dutiful tributes, and will surely be lost on younger viewers.

At a preview screening last weekend, a reference to The Empire Strikes Back’s “I am your father” scene drew a far heartier reaction from the mostly pre-teen crowd, though that may have also been related to the fact that Gervais’s character delivers it from the rim of an enormous toilet.


No cert, 98 mins. Sky Cinema and NOW from July 22