Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl review – Chuckles ...

Interestingly, this is the first-ever direct sequel Aardman has ever produced within the Wallace-verse, and it’s for their beloved 1993 short film The Wrong Trousers.

As super-fans (or anybody who’s watched British TV in the past twenty years) will know, that introduced us to the glove-wearing penguin villain Feathers McGraw, who set out to rob a diamond and ended up being thwarted by some of Gromit’s nifty track-laying.

This sequel picks things up pretty much where things left off. McGraw has been stripped of his rubber glove and locked away in prison – even worse, in fact, in a zoo. These days, he’s reduced to doing Terminator 2-style pull ups while starting at an old newspaper clipping of his foes.

Meanwhile, Wallace has stuck to doing what he does best/ worst: inventing. By the time this sequel starts, 62 West Wallaby Street is swimming with gadgets that do everything from get him up in the morning (watching it happen is as entertaining as ever) to patting Gromit on the head.

His latest invention is Norbot: an AI, voice-activated robot designed to help out around the house (it’s probably no coincidence that he looks custom designed to sell as a toy come Christmas, either).

“See how embracing technology makes our life better?” Wallace asks Gromit at once point, as Norbot potters around the house. “So long as it knows who’s boss, of course.”

Well guess what: Norbot doesn’t. In fact, he’s soon been hacked by McGraw and turns into a black-eyed little demon with a penchant for scuttling around, tilting his head and blinking ominously.

Watching him put his evil plans into action is profoundly unsettling – even more so when contrasted to the jolly, kiddie-friendly earlier scenes. The tonal disparity is bizarre, but at least it provides some respite from watching the film’s two police officers, DC Mackintosh and newbie PC Mukherjee, bicker about what it means to have a “copper’s gut”.

And the Aardman touches are there. A lot of love clearly goes into creating these stories, down to the clay fingerprints still very much visible on the figurines. Ben Whitehead does a genuinely great job in his first full-length appearance as Wallace (taking over from the late Peter Sallis), while Gromit’s expressions are so nuanced that just the twitch of his plasticine brow can convey everything from foreboding to horror.

But the studio’s ever-growing partnership with Netflix has left its mark, too. The clever jokes – always visible in the background of previous films – are fewer in number here, and the plot, while amusing, does also tread the same ground as many of the duo’s previous adventures.

Something Wallace invents goes wrong. He doesn’t believe it when Gromit points it out. There’s a batty chase sequence (previously involving bumper cars, a flying motorbike and a lorry; here involving canal boats) and things end happily ever after.

The words ‘playing it safe’ spring to mind, and while it’s plenty amusing, this seeming lack of willingness to try new things out means the film fails to hit the delirious heights of, say, Curse of the Were-Rabbit or the iconic track-laying sequence in The Wrong Trousers.

It provides chuckles, rather than belly laughs. But this is Aardman we’re talking about: still head and shoulders ahead of everybody else when it comes to delivering the warm and fuzzies. We’ll take chuckles if they’re this good, especially at Christmastime.

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl airs on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 6.10pm on Christmas Day