Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made

If you're reading this review because you're wondering what to cue up on your Disney+ subscription, Timmy Failure is the best of the new service's original programs by a wide margin. (Take that, you one-note Baby Yoda.)

One of those quick-witted films in which if one character or plot thread doesn’t work for you, all you have to do is wait a minute for another.

It walks the fine line between being too whimsical and too dramatic, yet maintains that delicate balancing act over the course of its entire runtime.

Think of Timmy Failure like a food truck: the best ones do one or two things really well, and commit to just doing those things. With McCarthy et al., Timmy Failure‘s virtues are an expertly-delivered dry wit that works for kids and adults alike, and a series of adorable performances, from Fegley and the rest of the kids to the all-too-game adults.

A frothy fantasy about a boy and his bear that makes up for in style what it lacks in substance.

The quiet humanity of McCarthy’s filmmaking meshes oddly with the material’s zanier demands, finally reaching an anodyne middle ground.

There isn’t enough in the way of good jokes or clever references to investigators of yore to make the film appealing, and the flatness of Timmy’s delivery, which is supposed to scan as deadpan, doesn’t contain enough nuances to make much of the humor land.

Timmy Failure, Mistakes Were Made is a very fun, incredibly charming story of imagination and the fun of a odd-outlook on life. It’s adapted from the book written by Stephen Pastis, creator of newspaper comic Pearls Before Swine, so you know there will be a strong, often-slightly-demented and odd sense of humor (hell, it is in Portland Oregon and leans into its setting’s oddity) through this story of an 11-year-old detective. Timmy has a bad-haircut and a heck of an imagination, he talks to his (thankfully) voiceless imaginary polar bear, and has imaginary story cut-aways like Doug or JD on Scrubs. He seems himself as an Encyclopedia Brown, coming up with an elaborate plot going on his town. It’s sweet and fun and a great family flick. The relationship he has with his mother Lovegood (she was the titular character in Autopsy of Jane Done, good to see her up and about!) is true. There is a dark cloud in their lives of her money-troubles and other issues, and that allows a truer nature to this flick. Yeah, I recommend it.

Timmy Failure is a slightly entertaining kids film filled with heart and wit, but one that you shouldn think too hard about, in which you will find the cracks of the plot and a deeper troubeling after thought of Timmy´s mental health (i´m not kidding).

For a family film this was more than ok. Nothing special and in time will become a filler for Disney+ catalogue but Disney produces a lot of this stuff for that specific target audience so with that in mind you can intuit the level of this production.