1/23/2025 - Free Birds Review

Wow, I have been on a bird-movie-related kick recently. All of them having very similar themes! Worst part is this wasn't intentional lol.  

I wanna mention that I watched this on a 20 mg edible, meaning I was pretty fucked up while watching it, but it also means I have disproportionally high thoughts about it on account of me being fucked up, lets talk about it.

This movie is fucking weird man, the plot is hypothetically a cliche but by bringing time travel into it, it just.. makes is so much stranger. Additionally, this movie is shockingly competent at times, especially the first half, and I really don't think its just because of the edible.

Free birds is a movie about Reggie, a turkey who unlike his peers knows of the impending doom that thanksgiving brings turkeys. Just before he is to be killed for thanksgiving dinner, he becomes the pardoned turkey, leading to a cushy pizza eating life style in a presidential suite. One day while living this cushy life, he is kidnapped by Jake, another turkey, with a mission: TO GO BACK IN TIME, AND GET TURKEYS OFF THE MENU! and thus shit happens.

Spoilers for fucking free bird ahead, so if you actually care about the plot to this movie, stop reading here.

Some general stuff: Music, I dont remember it, at all, I can't even remember if the movie had music, that is how whatever it was. Voice acting was surprisingly ok but for some reason a couple of the native American turkey's sounded like they were recording out of like.. their house instead of a studio for some reason. animation quality is fine, the actual time machine sequence was fun! the hunters design was very surprisingly competent, everything else was very generic 3d animation with cartoon style.

Ok, I kinda wanna talk about this in two halves, the half before they travel back in time, and the half after. Because this movie tanks in value after that first half. 

Half 1:

So while I was watching this movie I was obviously thinking about the classic "why are turkeys able to form a society, and why dont humans notice?" this is somewhat answered by the answer "because turkey's are stupid." which, to be honest, I can simply live with, it isn't like they are building anything or whatever, so that's fine. Getting onto the president and his daughter picking out the turkey, we get some pretty good lines from the little girl, some actual laugh out loud moments (maybe definitely due to the edibles kicking in). After they get to the basecamp though, the daughter and president are essentially phased the fuck out which I thought was strange, I mean we literally only see the president one more time and the daughter NEVER again, to the point that reggie takes over her room. (fan theory he killed her in cold blood). The pizza guy was pretty good too. Once Reggie is kidnapped by jake, the entire time travel break in and guards scene was actually legit good, like very competent in a lot of ways, surprisingly so! to the point that found myself thinking "wow I'd watch this part even not-high", the jokes landed, the animation hit, the cuts were good, sound mixing etc all damn 8/10 material. The time machine STEVE was legit more good comedy. Special shout out SPECIFICALLY to the scene where they actually say "go back in time to get turkeys off the menu" the scene is fine on its own, but high as shit and waiting for that specific line? me and my buddies actually fucking lost it, tears, truly. 

Half 2:

Once Reggie and jake actually go back in time, this movie starts to suck, for a lot of reasons. To be honest there is a lot I could talk about here but I'm just going to point out a few key things I thought were lame. Firstly: almost all the turkeys were designed to be playing off architypes from other movies. Reggie's love interest Jenny and reggie himself had a Rango (a legitimately fantastic film) thing going on even down to the fact that Jenny had a "shocking" aspect when she got stressed (lazy eye) just like Bean's "freeze", we had these two stupid ass fucking birds, a redbird and a tiny turkey who were trying to Pedro and Nico from Rio. Those who weren't ideas stolen from 2011 animated films were just boring architypes. It made the movie lose a lot of its personality it had built from the first half. Secondly AND WHAT STUCK OUT MOST TO ME I had to question why half of these damn characters were even on screen! there was this long hair turkey who had like 3 scenes yet did nothing, who was he! why should I care! the little latino bird, equally pointless character, I literally do not give a fuck about him, actually I actively disliked him. Then there was the turkey - chicken hybrid bird. I don't even remember his name and frankly he is SO unimportant that I cannot find an image for him on google. I LOATH this character, he gets 5, count em, 5 SOLOS SCENES with 30 + seconds of screen time per section. he gets nearly 5 minutes of screen time in this movie, an entire 1% of this film is spent on this stupid character with absolutely NO point. He has no dialogue, he just goes "ha cha cha", he doesn't actually do anything, he doesn't push the plot along, I simply do not fucking understand why he exists OTHER than MAYBE to fill a 5 second timeslot in the trailer like some sort of film mascot. I know this is a lot of charged emotions for this bird but if you watch the movie maybe you'll understand.

The bastard bird in question.

At the end of the day this movie is so utterly basic its hard to hate or love, there are some very competent parts and then there are some very non-competent parts. For what its worth, it got some laughs out of me. I guess. 

cya next time.