“Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” Serves Series Well

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Merlin Crossingham/Nick Park, 2024) 3½ out of 5 stars

The last feature-length Wallace & Gromit film—The Curse of the Were-Rabbit—came out in 2005. Until now, it was the one-and-only such movie, as all previous adventures of the animated duo were in short format. Getting ready to stream on Netflix is the latest episode, Vengeance Most Fowl, which clocks in at a brisk 79 minutes. Aardman Animations released Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget in 2023, and as with that franchise, this second installment serves up plenty of red meat for fans of the series while never quite standing out as a masterpiece of the genre. It delivers plenty of good fun, however.

For those uninitiated in the long-standing stop-motion delights of co-director Nick Park and company, Wallace and Gromit are a human-canine pair, the former a (sometimes scatterbrained) inventor and the latter a highly intelligent and capable (if mute) dog who always must clean up Wallace’s messes, even as he longs for his approval and love. The core of their narratives is always sweet, no matter the dangers they run. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is no exception.

The film begins with a flashback to the events of the 1993 short The Wrong Trousers, in which Wallace and Gromit managed to outsmart the penguin criminal Feathers McGraw, a would-be jewel thief—disguised as a chicken—whose clever plan to steal the famous “Blue Diamond” was thwarted, primarily by Gromit, with the aftermath of the escapade landing him in prison. Where he is at the start of Vengeance Most Fowl.

But not for long, as he once again proves initially savvier than either Wallace and Gromit, using the former’s latest invention against him (as he did in The Wrong Trousers). And what is that invention? A robot garden gnome named Norbot, with which Wallace hopes to start a gardening business and earn enough money to pay off some debts. As usual, Gromit at first bears the consequences of everything that goes wrong, though he ultimately triumphs.

One of the hallmarks of these films is the ingenuity of the Rube Goldberg devices on display, coupled with the consistently family-friendly mayhem. Even as the stakes rise and we worry about the outcome, the violence is always of a sort where the worst somehow never comes to pass. In addition, for dog lovers, the series is a blast, often alluding to another put-upon canid, Snoopy. And as much as the chaos in Vengeance Most Fowl might feel like a retread of past hits, there are still many laugh-out-loud moments to savor. Go, Gromit, Go!

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.