REVIEW: Leo [2023]

Rating: PG | Runtime: 102 minutes
Release Date: November 17th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Netflix Animation / Netflix
Director(s): Robert Marianetti, Robert Smigel & David Wachtenheim
Writer(s): Robert Smigel & Adam Sandler and Paul Sado

Change is a beautiful part of life.

Considering most Adam Sandler films (especially the early ones) had some sort of wholesome life lesson behind the stupid jokes, pivoting to a children’s film shouldn’t be surprising. Neither should the fact he’s enlisted an SNL cohort to do so—namely, “TV Funhouse” creator Robert Smigel who co-directs (with Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim) and co-writes (with Sandler and Paul Sado). Sometimes the gag finds itself right up against the PG-line, but Leo restrains itself to stick to its goal of sharing those life lessons in the most absurd ways possible. And I don’t just mean because they come from a talking lizard.

Sandler plays seventy-four-year-old retile Leonardo who literally just discovered he’s about to die (someone told him his life expectancy is seventy-five). So, in hopes of finding his escape to finally live outside his cage, he embraces the decision by a Middle School taskmaster of a substitute teacher (Cecily Strong’s Ms. Malkin) to reinstate the tradition of one student taking a class pet home for the weekend. While his best friend Squirtle the turtle (Bill Burr) hides in his shell so as not to get picked, Leo starts hatching a plan to find a window and hitchhike to the Everglades. But before he can, he discovers his decades on Earth may have given him reason to stay by helping these anxious and awkward twelve-year-olds.

Think Charlotte’s Web (referenced as a bookend) if Wilbur was a classroom of insecure tweens desperate for anyone to listen to their problems without judgment. Leo gives them the push they need to excel, the parents think Ms. Malkin is some kid-whisperer with a liberal Dustbuster finger, and the inevitable fallout (via selfish motivations) leads to a heroic rescue attempt to ensure these fifth graders’ savior knows he’s loved. Add some endearing if forgettable songs (one is about how crying is a sign of weakness wherein the lesson that it really isn’t comes after the music and thus leaves the song itself quite problematic without that context) and you get a well-meaning if forgettable film.

The kid voice actors are great, though. And the running kindergarteners as feral, unformed doodles by comparison to the nicely rendered leads is a hoot. The jokes are lowbrow and the lessons less effective on their own than as a whole (don’t be afraid to be vulnerable since none of us are perfect), but the package is sufficiently cute with more than a few moments that had me laughing out loud—even if the rest was merely amusing at best. Its target audience will have a good time without being scandalized, so it succeeds at doing what it’s meant to do. Maybe it helps become a Sandler gateway as they age too, a development Netflix surely covets considering they’ve been his patron of the arts since 2015.