If you want to end your cinematic year on a nice easy high, there are few more surefire hits that catching the new Wallace & Gromit on the BBC on Christmas Day. It’s a recipe built for jolly cosiness and that’s exactly what Vengeance Most Fowl provides, another lovely entry from Aardman that is the definition of fun for the whole family. Walking the line between actual full-blown movie (a la Curse of the Were-Rabbit) and their more definitively-for-TV shorts, it’s a brisk 80 minutes that makes for a comforting full stop to 2024.
Over 30 years after The Wrong Trousers, Vengeance Most Fowl reunites our iconic inventor-and-dog duo with old penguin foe Feathers McGraw, seeking revenge for his previous foiling while locked up in bird prison (aka an Antarctica exhibit at the local zoo). To do this, he exploits Wallace’s (voiced now by Ben Whitehead, doing a genuinely flawless Peter Sallis impression) latest invention, a deeply creepy robot gnome assistant called Norbot (Reece Shearsmith). It is, as always, a very silly plot, full of the classic Aardman mix of sight gags, endearingly cheesy puns, and the silent Gromit being smarter than all the human characters put together.
Covering old and very fondly remembered ground, there is something just a little unambitious about Vengeance Most Fowl, but when you’ve spent nearly 40 years perfecting characters like Nick Park and co have done with Wallace and Gromit, you’re allowed to play the hits. There are a lot of laughs here, from the best-in-class stop-motion animation to all of Wallace’s face-palming numbskullery (his ‘cyber-defenses’ installed around Norbot are particularly hilarious, inept enough for Feathers McGraw to just flip a switch and immediately turn the gnome on to an ‘Evil’ setting).
Our old feathered foe is just as funny, dastardly yet charming, while Gromit remains one of cinema’s great silent characters – no one else, man or dog, has ever said so much without even having a mouth. He’s part Snoopy, part Chaplin, and even (in a wonderfully slow riverboat chase set-piece) part Ethan Hunt during a third act that very openly riffs on the most recent Mission Impossible. It’s not the finest hour of Wallace and Gromit, but that is an exceptionally high bar to clear and for some sleepy communal viewing, you couldn’t really ask for much more.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 
The ending location reminded me of Knaresborough