Review: Chicken Run (dir. by Peter Lord & Nick Park)

Posted on September 14, 2026 by Arleigh

“I don’t want to be a pie. I don’t like gravy.” — Babs

Chicken Run is one of those animated films that seems simple at first glance: a bunch of chickens want to escape a farm before they become pies. That basic premise could have easily turned into a lightweight family comedy full of barnyard jokes and little else. Instead, the 2000 DreamWorks and Aardman production, directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park, plays like a miniature war movie, prison-break thriller, romance, survival adventure, and pitch-black satire all at once. It is consistently funny, but its comedy works because the stakes feel real. These chickens are not merely trying to get away from an annoying farmer; they are trying to survive an industrial system that sees them as disposable raw material.

The first thing that makes Chicken Run so memorable is how completely it commits to its central influence: John Sturges’s The Great Escape. Ginger, voiced with determined energy by Julia Sawalha, is essentially the Steve McQueen-like mastermind of a prisoner-of-war escape film, only without the motorcycle. She has attempted escape after escape from the Tweedys’ chicken farm, and every failure has made her more experienced, more stubborn, and more isolated from the flock. The farm itself is built and filmed like a prison camp: there are fences, watchtowers, guards, roll calls, surveillance, punishments, and a constant feeling that someone is always being watched. The chickens dig tunnels, build plans, assign tasks, debate leadership, and struggle with morale in a way that directly echoes the Allied prisoners in The Great Escape.

That influence is not just a clever parody. It gives the movie a real sense of structure and urgency. Ginger is not a character who simply wishes for freedom; she is obsessed with earning it. Every failed attempt lands her in the punishment shed, a tiny isolated box that is funny in its exaggerated stop-motion form but also genuinely unpleasant. The sight of Ginger sitting alone in darkness, listening to the rain and realizing that another escape has failed, establishes that the movie is willing to make her suffering count. She is not invincible, and the other chickens do not always believe in her. That gives her eventual success much more weight than it would have had in a more conventional cartoon.

The Tweedys are also far more sinister than the average animated villains. Mr. Tweedy, voiced by Tony Haygarth, is the bumbling half of the pair: nervous, confused, increasingly paranoid, and convinced that “the chickens are organizing.” It is one of the best-running jokes in the movie because he is absolutely right, but his wife refuses to take him seriously. Melisha Tweedy, voiced by Miranda Richardson, is the truly frightening one. She is cold, practical, greedy, and almost entirely without sentiment. When egg production drops, she does not consider improving conditions for the chickens. She decides to turn them into chicken pies.

That is where Chicken Run goes into much darker territory than its cheerful clay-animation style initially suggests. The film’s narrative is built around factory farming, confinement, exploitation, and mass slaughter. The chickens know that when one of them stops laying eggs, she is not being taken somewhere safe. She is taken away to die. The scene involving the elderly hen Edwina is particularly unsettling because it is handled with restraint. The audience never sees explicit violence, but the implication is unmistakable. The sound of the axe, the sudden absence, and the reactions of the other chickens tell the whole story. It is dark material for a family film, but it is never treated as a joke. The humor comes from character behavior and British deadpan timing, not from dismissing the fear these animals feel.

That balance is one of the movie’s greatest achievements. Chicken Run is undeniably an animated comedy, filled with visual gags, eccentric voices, and absurdly specific bits of dialogue, yet its themes remain surprisingly grim. The Tweedys’ new pie machine is not just a goofy invention. It is a huge, mechanized symbol of industrialized cruelty, a machine designed to turn living creatures into products at maximum efficiency. Once it appears, the farm stops feeling merely like a prison camp and starts feeling like something even more horrifying: a production line where the inmates are literally the merchandise. The comedy makes the movie accessible, but the darker ideas give it teeth.

Aardman’s stop-motion animation is essential to that effect. The chickens are expressive in a way that never makes them overly cute or polished. Their handmade look gives them texture and personality. You can see the fingerprints of the animators in the characters’ surfaces, the uneven little details of the farm, and the tangible construction of the machinery. Modern computer animation can create smoother movement and more elaborate spectacle, but Chicken Run has a physical presence that is hard to replicate digitally. The fences feel like real fences. The mud feels like real mud. The pie machine feels enormous and dangerous because it is a real object built in miniature and photographed frame by frame.

The design also helps sell the film’s strange mix of bleakness and whimsy. The Tweedys’ farm is gray, muddy, cramped, and oppressive, a place where every chicken coop resembles a barracks. Beyond the fence is a bright green countryside that feels almost mythic to the trapped flock. Freedom is not some vague emotional idea; it is visible right there, just beyond reach. That visual contrast makes Ginger’s desperation easy to understand. She is not asking for luxury. She wants sunlight, open space, and the ability to live without being counted, confined, or killed for failing to produce enough eggs.

Mel Gibson’s Rocky Rhodes enters the story as the possible answer to Ginger’s problem. He is introduced as a flying American rooster who crashes into the farm like a larger-than-life war hero. His nickname, “the Lone Free Ranger,” and his exaggerated confidence make him feel like a parody of classic American movie masculinity. Rocky is all swagger, charm, and improvised survival instinct, which makes him a good contrast to Ginger’s disciplined, strategic personality. He tells the chickens he can teach them to fly, and the entire farm becomes invested in the idea even when the plan seems impossible.

Rocky works because the film does not make him a flawless hero. He is entertaining and ultimately brave, but he is also a fraud. His supposed ability to fly is part of a circus act, and he has escaped captivity before by using a human-operated catapult rather than his own wings. When the truth comes out, it hurts because the chickens have placed their hope in him. Ginger especially feels betrayed, not only because Rocky lied but because she allowed herself to believe that someone else might finally have the answer. Their relationship has a nice edge to it; it is not a sweeping romance so much as a reluctant partnership between two strong-willed survivors who approach freedom in completely different ways.

The sequences built around the escape plan show how much fun Lord and Park have with action-adventure movie language. While The Great Escape is the most obvious inspiration, certain moments have an energy reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are close calls with traps, rapid-fire improvisation, looming mechanical threats, and escapes that depend on inches of timing. The climax inside and around the pie machine especially has that pulpy serial-adventure tension. Characters are dragged toward blades and conveyor belts, machinery rattles and groans, and plans collapse only for someone to invent another solution at the last possible second.

The final act also brings in a strong resemblance to The Flight of the Phoenix, particularly in the way the chickens turn desperation into engineering. The flock has to build a flying machine out of whatever materials they can gather, and the project depends on cooperation between characters with very different skills. Fowler, the elderly rooster voiced by Benjamin Whitrow, becomes crucial here. At first he seems like a pompous relic, forever talking about his days in the Royal Air Force and resisting Ginger’s modern plans. But his knowledge and experience eventually become useful. He gives the group the language, confidence, and organizational spark needed to turn their makeshift aircraft from a dream into something that might actually leave the ground.

Fowler is also one of the funniest parts of the film because he represents a specific kind of old British pride: stubborn, ceremonial, and deeply attached to the past. His stories about serving under “the old RAF” seem ridiculous until the moment the chickens actually need someone who understands the basic principles of flying. The film never makes him into a conventional action hero, but it allows him to reclaim some dignity. Like many of the supporting characters, he gets a small but satisfying arc.

The rest of the flock is memorable because they are not interchangeable background animals. Babs is sweet, distracted, and constantly knitting, but her innocent manner hides an ability to contribute when it matters. Bunty is blunt, cynical, and always ready to question Ginger’s plans. Mac, with her Scottish accent and technical expertise, is the group’s engineer and probably the person most likely to explain why a wild idea will not work. Fetcher, the rat, is opportunistic and cowardly, but he is useful in the way only a black-market scavenger can be. Even the two dimwitted farm dogs have personality, serving as comic obstacles while still making the farm feel guarded and dangerous.

What makes Chicken Run endure is that it never treats its characters’ freedom as a trivial goal. The story has jokes about eggs, knitting, chicken behavior, British class attitudes, and American bravado, but beneath all of that is a serious belief that a community can refuse to accept the role assigned to it. Ginger’s greatest strength is not that she has the perfect plan. It is that she refuses to surrender when every plan fails. Her determination eventually spreads to the other chickens, who stop seeing themselves as helpless inmates and start acting like participants in their own rescue.

The ending is satisfying because it feels earned. The chickens do not escape through luck alone, and they do not wait for a human to save them. They escape because they organize, take risks, use their talents, forgive one another’s failures, and choose action over resignation. That is a surprisingly powerful message for a film about clay chickens escaping a pie factory.

More than two decades later, Chicken Run still stands as one of the strongest animated films of its era. Its stop-motion craft remains beautiful, its jokes still land, and its references to The Great Escape, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Flight of the Phoenix add an extra layer of fun for viewers familiar with those films. But it is the movie’s willingness to acknowledge fear, exploitation, and death beneath the comedy that makes it more than a clever genre spoof. Chicken Run is funny because it is inventive, but it is memorable because it understands that freedom means the most when it is hardest to achieve.

Review: Normal (dir. by Ben Wheatley)

Posted on May 26, 2026 by Arleigh

“I used to be a regular sheriff.” — Sheriff Ulysses

Ben Wheatley has built a career on making audiences uncomfortable. From the cultish dread of Kill List to the seasick chaos of Free Fire, he specializes in a specific kind of British miserablism that suddenly snaps into shocking ultraviolence. So, the idea of him directing a snowbound, American action-comedy starring Bob Odenkirk felt a little like hiring a surgeon to cater a birthday party. You know the food will be technically proficient, but you are terrified of what might be in the sauce. The 2026 film Normal, written by Derek Kolstad and Bob Odenkirk, is exactly that catering job: it is messy, bloody, surprisingly filling, and leaves you with a weird stomach ache if you think about it too long. But in a summer movie season often defined by joyless CGI sludge, Normal is a blast of R-rated, mid-budget freshness that knows exactly how stupid it is, even if it stumbles on its way to the finish line.

The premise is a beautiful piece of elevator pitch simplicity. Odenkirk plays Sheriff Ulysses, a haunted, world-weary interim sheriff who takes a short-term gig in the tiny, freezing Minnesotan town of Normal. The previous sheriff died under mysterious circumstances (ice fishing accident, sure), and Ulysses is just looking for a quiet place to drink coffee, ignore his wife’s phone calls, and heal. The problem is that Normal, Minnesota, is anything but. As Ulysses walks the beat, he notices the quiet desperation of rural America has been replaced by a strange, Stepford-like prosperity. The knitting store sells AR-15s. The diner’s walls are lined with loaded rifles. The town has somehow raised sixteen million dollars for a new town hall. It turns out that the citizens of Normal have sold their souls—and their town—to the Yakuza, acting as a quiet, frozen Swiss bank account for Japanese organized crime. When a pair of bumbling out-of-town robbers (Reena Jolly and Brendan Fletcher) hits the local bank, the bulletproof glass shatters, and Ulysses finds himself trapped in a blizzard, fighting for his life against an entire town of friendly, flannel-wearing killers.

Having Odenkirk as co-writer explains a lot about why Normal feels different from Kolstad’s other work. Where John Wick and the first Nobody are lean, machine-tooled scripts, Normal has a looser, more character-obsessed texture. The dialogue is full of weird pauses, non-sequiturs, and the kind of conversational detours that defined Odenkirk’s television work on Better Call Saul. You can feel the actor’s hand in every scene where Ulysses just stares at a absurd situation and mutters something mundane like “Well, that’s not ideal.” If you have seen the Nobody films, you know the rhythm Odenkirk plays as a performer. But what makes Odenkirk so fascinating to watch in Normal is how he continues to solidify an idea we haven’t really seen since Liam Neeson stumbled into Taken: the deeply unconventional action hero. Think about it. Before Neeson, action stars were Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis—men built like refrigerators. Then Neeson showed up at fifty-six, all grief-stricken eyebrows and theatrical training, and suddenly audiences realized that a sad dad with a “particular set of skills” was just as terrifying as any bodybuilder. Odenkirk is the spiritual successor to that twist.

No one ever looked at the guy who played slimy lawyer Saul Goodman or the hapless comic from Mr. Show and thought, “There is our next great screen fighter.” Yet here we are, years after the first Nobody, and Odenkirk has quietly become the most believable everyman action lead of his generation. Unlike Neeson’s brooding intensity, Odenkirk brings a specific, almost pathetic vulnerability. In Normal, he excels at playing the “sad dad” action hero—the guy whose joints pop when he stands up, who looks like an accountant but moves like a bar fight. Ulysses isn’t a retired assassin; he’s just a cop who is very, very tired. When he dispatches a thug with a fire extinguisher, there is no cool one-liner, just a wheeze and a wince. That grounded exhaustion is the Odenkirk brand, and because he co-wrote the part, it fits him like a tailored suit. He sells the physicality without losing that “I’m too old for this” shuffle, making you believe a middle-aged man could survive a gauntlet of killers purely out of stubbornness and regret. Henry Winkler, as the smarmy Mayor Kibner, chews the frozen scenery with glee, playing a man so polite and effervescent that you want to punch him immediately. Lena Headey shows up as a barkeep with a shotgun, and while she doesn’t get enough to do, she brings the necessary grit.

However, the secret weapon here is actually Ben Wheatley and his “anti-action” philosophy. In a recent interview, Wheatley described the violence in Normal as being akin to Final Destination. That is the smartest thing about this movie. In a typical John Wick movie, the hero is a force of nature; he actively kills people with surgical precision. In Normal, Ulysses doesn’t so much defeat the town as survive it. In one fantastic set piece, a character slips on ice and impales themselves on their own bayonet. In another, a massive sign falls and crushes a gunman mid-monologue. The town itself becomes a hostile, slippery, glass-strewn deathtrap. This gives Normal a chaotic, Looney Tunes energy that separates it from its cousins. You never know who is going to die next or how, and Wheatley directs the carnage with a blackly comic eye. The sound design of bones crunching against frozen asphalt is disturbingly hilarious. This isn’t the graceful ballet of assassination; it’s the slapstick of murder, and it is refreshing. And Odenkirk’s performance is the perfect anchor for this chaos because he always looks slightly surprised to still be alive—a quality Neeson, for all his skills, rarely conveyed. The fact that Odenkirk helped write the script means those reactions of shock and reluctant disgust feel genuine rather than performed.

But let’s address the moose in the room. Normal desperately wants to be Fargo, but it only has the vocabulary of a comic book. The Coen Brothers’ masterpiece works because the quirky dialogue masks a terrifying emptiness. Normal wears its quirk on its sleeve like a cheap souvenir. The film tries to weave in social commentary about the death of rural America, gun culture, and even features a subplot involving a trans nonbinary teen (Jess McLeod) who was the child of the previous sheriff. These moments are handled with a surprising amount of grace—they aren’t preachy, just present. However, the film is moving so fast (the runtime is a lean 91 minutes) that it forgets to give these themes any weight. You get a five-second shot of a wall of guns, and then someone blows up. The commentary is there, but it’s just set dressing for the explosion.

Furthermore, the plot structure is lopsided. The film opens with a cold sequence in Japan with the Yakuza cutting off fingers and looking menacing. It feels like a contractual obligation to remind you this is from the John Wick universe, and it’s hard not to wonder if that was a Kolstad-driven choice while Odenkirk might have preferred more mystery. It completely spoils the slow-burn reveal of the town’s corruption. Imagine The Wicker Man if the first scene showed you the villagers burning the wicker man. The tension of Ulysses realizing that “the call is coming from inside the house” is neutered because we, the audience, already know the Yakuza are lurking in the basement. Also, for a movie called Normal, it is incredibly predictable within its own lane. Once the shooting starts, you know exactly where Ulysses is going to end up (spoiler: a hardware store and then the police station). The film devolves into a familiar Assault on Precinct 13 siege scenario, and while the kills are inventive, the geography of the action gets muddy. Wheatley shoots the snowy exteriors beautifully—the white landscape makes the red blood pop like neon—but during the frantic third act, the editing gets choppy, and you lose track of who is shooting whom. For a movie that prides itself on “anti-action,” it relies heavily on the generic rhythms of action in its final twenty minutes.

Despite these structural hiccups, Normal works because it never overstays its welcome. At a brisk hour and a half, it gets in, blows up a town, and gets out. Bob Odenkirk continues to prove that he is the most relatable action hero of the 2020s—the natural heir to the “unlikely badass” throne that Liam Neeson occupied for a solid decade. Where Neeson brought Shakespearean tragedy to the genre, Odenkirk brings a frustrated accountant’s fury. He looks like he just finished paying his taxes, and you believe he is furious about it. Having co-written the film only deepens that authenticity; this isn’t a star merely showing up to say lines, but an actor who has shaped the material to his exact strengths. Ben Wheatley manages to smuggle just enough British cynicism and nasty violence into the frame to keep genre fans on their toes.

Is Normal a great film? No. It is too shallow and too structurally messy for that. But is it a great time at the movies? Absolutely. It is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food laced with hot sauce. You know what you are getting, but the kick is still satisfying. For fans of Odenkirk’s grumpy charm and Wheatley’s chaotic tendencies, Normal is a perfectly abnormal way to spend an evening. Just don’t go looking for the heart that the title promises; this one is all viscera. And frankly, in an era where most action movies are built from the same digital spare parts, watching a former comedy writer freeze his way through a Yakuza invasion feels like the most refreshing kind of normal we could ask for.