Metacritic reviews

Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers is an ingenious parody of our IP-obsessed culture that also manages to show how joyous and brilliant this combination and celebration of old properties can be when done extremely well.

Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers is a proudly very daffy and strange movie.

Reminiscent of The Happytime Murders but actually watchable, this zippy, highly amiable rodent noir turns out to be a delightful surprise. It flings a lot of ideas at the screen — and most of them stick.

This hilariously meta reboot — excuse me, comeback — is everything the recent Space Jam sequel desperately attempted but failed to be. Premiering exclusively on Disney+, it’s the funniest movie of the year so far, either animated or live-action.

It makes for a creative, clever watch, though one that seems exclusively imagined to cater to the series’ older fans and otherwise mature audiences.

More importantly, the jokes are sharp, and a lot of them lean on adult sensibilities — though in the way the union bit in Shrek 2 does, instead of being crude or cruel.

This frenetic and funny crossbreeding of live action and cartoon is both a reboot and an anti-reboot, a corporate-funded raspberry at corporate IP, and a giddily dumb smart aleck committed to mocking its joke — and making it, too.

Right from the start, Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers knows what it wants to be. It’s clever! It’s playful! It’s meta! Turning the story into a tale of Hollywood has-beens is surely intriguing, and the appeal of the chipmunks investigating a neo-noir mystery largely worked in its favor. However, all the hard-boiled, real world capers may leave fans of the original longing for an altogether different type of revival, more in line with Disney+’s successful, if tragically canceled, reinvestment in DuckTales.

If you must reboot an over 30-year-old Disney Channel cartoon like Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, you could do much worse than looking to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” for inspiration. But it is a high bar and though Chip ‘n Dale might not reach the heights of that Robert Zemeckis film, it is still a pleasant surprise stuffed to the brim with pop culture references that children of the Chip ’n Dale era may enjoy.

Rather than major fits of laughter, chuckles of acknowledgement pepper the audience’s viewing experience, at least for folks over the age of 25.