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Lyle Lyle Crocodile Movie Review

Lyle Lyle Crocodile is a 2022 family musical comedy film directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon and starring Constance Wu and Javier Bardem. It is a standard family flick.

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“Who wants to be safe?

We are here to live,

and living is a dangerous business“

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Based on an older children’s story, this cinematic adaptation does not feel traditional at all, except in the storytelling beats, but the execution is very modern for better and for worse. The plot itself is very clichéd. A family relocates, a boy has trouble adjusting, and then he meets a singing crocodile who changes his life forever.

It’s not the premise that is very typical, but every single plot point is beyond predictable and tiresome. You got the animal control plot point. You also got the pesky neighbor. You got the inspirational finale. You got the courtroom drama scene. We’ve all seen it before and we’ve seen it done much better, most recently and most effectively in ‘Paddington’.

As for those modern elements, this is a musical with the songs written by Pasek and Paul of ‘The Greatest Showman’ fame. They are highly talented, so even their weaker efforts here are still solid. The soundtrack highlights include Take a Look at Us Now and Top of the World. The former is the heart of the movie and it is so much fun and quite memorable in all its renditions while the latter is the best song in the movie as it’s the catchiest one with best singing and the best beat.

Lyle Lyle Crocodile achieved the best results during those musical sequences where the energy in execution was the most palpable. Shawn Mendes’ singing was also great. Unfortunately, the movie is quite forgettable and bland in every other aspect. The characters are truly uninspired and weakly developed. The parents are utterly uninteresting and the protagonist is your typical likable kid and nothing more than that.

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The titular creature did not get to have a bigger personality. He’s a singing character who doesn’t talk at all and his only way of speaking is through song, which was very odd and never explained properly. Some of the scenes with him are quite cute and he is an endearing character, but I wanted a better story for him. Javier Bardem as Hector is by far the most memorable personality of the bunch as Bardem played this role with so much over-the-top joy and charisma, proving to the world that he can be goofy and fun in the right circumstances.