In fact, and this is where I'll lose some of you (but it's where my mind goes when I'm bored during a kids' movie), there's a struggling LGBT undercurrent to the whole story. Especially when it comes to how much Turbo wants to desperately change who he is as a creature entirely. And, subsequently, how much he's told that he's wrong for wanting to be something different. You get relentlessly beaten about the head by both sides of the fence so much that after a while you have to clear the cobwebs and remember that you're watching a stunt-casted cartoon flick.
But none of that stuff works against the movie per se. That's what most of these animated films have come to be. Someone wants the impossible and then they get it because, you know, happy endings and all that jazz. All they have to do on their end is never stop wanting it.
No, the main thing that drags Turbo down is the fact that we've just seen so much of it before. It's got some Madagascar in it (director David Soren helmed the Madagascar TV specials), some Toy Story (bad seed kid who loves to squash snails gets tables turned on him) and a lot of Cars - complete with its own version of customer-starved Radiator Springs, here a Van Nuys strip mall called Starlight Plaza. So it's a Franken-feature through and through.
Turbo, after becoming a hazard to his own garden community, heads out into the San Fernando Valley one night and accidentally gets shellacked in a street racer's nitrous oxide, giving him super-snail speedster abilities. From there, he and his bro, both ostracized, find a new home with some novelty racing snails (sure) in a garage next to a struggling taco stand run by brothers Tito and Angelo - voiced by Michael Peña and Luis Guzmán. As it turns out, Tito is also a dreamer and it's his underdog notions that take Turbo, along with fellow plaza shop owners (voiced by Michelle Rodriguez, Ken Jeong, and Richard Jenkins) to Indianapolis to race in the big leagues.
From there the story plays out as predictably as possible, leaving little room for surprise or inspiration. Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop Dogg (Lion?) and Maya Rudolph play members of Turbo's rag-tag daredevil snail crew as the movie tries its hardest to convince you that a super-powered snail is somehow the underdog in a racing sport, despite the fact that he's already vastly superior simply by being a supernatural "thing that should not be." A chemical has, in fact, enhanced his performance. Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler, IGN at mattfowler, and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity.