A detective movie named after a misheard B-52’s song
Brad Bird’s $200 million-scale noir cartoon drew warm reviews and faint praise — not quite the same thing.
By The Weekend · · 5 min read
"Ray Gunn" exists because Brad Bird misheard a 1979 B-52's song. He thought "Planet Claire" was a new arrangement of Henry Mancini's "Theme From Peter Gunn," realized his mistake, and liked the accidental pun enough to build a feature-length neo-noir cartoon around it. That is, by the director's own account at the film's London Film Festival premiere, the entire origin story. No studio mandate, no franchise mapping, no focus group. Just a mishearing that stuck.
A detective pastiche arrives with real pedigree and real reviews attached
"Ray Gunn" premiered Saturday at the Royal Festival Hall, with Scarlett Johansson and Sam Rockwell voicing the leads and composer Michael Giacchino — whose birthday happened to land on premiere night — scoring it. The film comes from Skydance Animation, produced under John Lasseter, and lands on Netflix December 18 after a limited theatrical run starting December 4. David Ellison, who now runs the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. empire, is credited among its producers, which puts an executive with no 2026 animated contender of his own attached to a film at a rival streamer.
The reviews split in a way worth naming precisely, because "mixed" undersells how differently two trade outlets read the same eighty-some minutes. The Hollywood Reporter called it "blandly palatable," "not so much awful as underwhelming," with characters so thin that Ray Gunn — the hero — has "no personality beyond 'good.'" Deadline called the same film "nifty," "visually sumptuous," and Oscar-category material, comparing it favorably to "The Maltese Falcon," "Chinatown" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Both reviews describe the same plot: a down-on-his-luck private eye, voiced by Rockwell, hired by a studio boss to keep his volatile pop-star client, voiced by Johansson, out of trouble, which naturally spirals into murder, blackmail and a mob boss alien who wants her back.
The split isn't about facts, it's about what each critic counted as the film's job
Strip the adjectives and the two reviews agree on almost everything measurable. Both single out an alien mob boss named Slugsy, voiced by Matt Berry, as the one visually distinctive character in a cast of otherwise generic humans. Both note the film's songs — written and produced by New Zealand musician Kimbra — are better than the script surrounding them, and both reviews independently invoke "KPop Demon Hunters" as the comparison point for a pop-star-plus-animation premise that's recently proven it can work at scale. Both describe the action as competent rather than inventive, with one shootout involving a malfunctioning weapon singled out by name in each piece as the film's single creative peak.
What differs is tolerance for pastiche as a form. Deadline's review reads the film as a deliberate "love letter" assembled from named ingredients — Bogart-and-Bacall chemistry, "Blade Runner" production design, a dash of "Dick Tracy," a city called Metropia built as "1939 as an alternate future" — and scores it on how well those ingredients combine. The Hollywood Reporter's review scores it on whether a viewer unfamiliar with those references would find anything to hold onto, and concludes the title character doesn't survive outside his source material: he's "a disgraced cop" for reasons that amount to being too virtuous, and little else is offered about who he is.
Giacchino's score and Kimbra's songs are doing work the screenplay isn't credited for
Both critics agree the music carries weight the writing doesn't. Johansson's character, Venus Nova, performs several original songs within the story, and both reviews treat these numbers as the film's more confident stretches — a detail that matters because it suggests the gap between the two reviews isn't really about Bird's direction or the voice work, which both reviews praise, but about a screenplay credited to Bird and Matthew Robbins that gives its characters inspirations rather than interiors. Johansson, for her part, said at the premiere that working with Bird was the draw regardless of outcome: "I just wanted to work with him so badly," she told reporters, calling him a director who approaches animation "from this other artistic perspective" compared to others she's worked with.
A trades split like this one is itself informative, not noise
The gap between the two reviews is the story, more than either review alone. Trade press rarely diverges this cleanly on tone while agreeing this closely on specifics — same standout alien, same best action beat, same music comparison, same character thinness in the lead. That pattern usually means a film succeeded at exactly what it set out to do and that the ambition itself is contestable: a loving assemblage of 1940s detective tropes wrapped in a 1939-retrofuture skin, with a plot that borrows its shape from "The Maltese Falcon" rather than inventing one. If you value the assemblage, as Deadline does, the film reads as accomplished genre work. If you expect an original emotional core under the pastiche, as The Hollywood Reporter does, the same film reads as hollow.
That divergence will likely repeat once a wider audience sees it in December. Netflix's own track record with "KPop Demon Hunters" earlier this year showed that pop-star-plus-animated-noir hybrids can land with general audiences regardless of critical consensus on the script, provided the music genuinely works — which both reviews here concede it does. Kimbra's songs are the one element neither outlet contests.
What the theatrical window actually tests
The December 4 limited theatrical run, three weeks ahead of the Netflix release, functions as a qualifying mechanism rather than a box-office bet: it's the standard route studios use to keep an animated film eligible for the Academy's Best Animated Feature category, which Deadline's review explicitly floats as a target. That category has grown crowded with critically adored contenders in recent years, and "Ray Gunn" will need the theatrical qualifying run to count, regardless of how many tickets it sells in that window. The real test isn't the per-screen gross in early December — it's whether branch voters respond the way Deadline did, to the assemblage, or the way The Hollywood Reporter did, to what's missing underneath it.