Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl: a thrilling return for Feathers McGraw

Much dust has gathered on Wallace and Gromit’s teapot since their last screen outing, 16 years ago, in A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008); more since their only previous feature, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005); and three decades’ worth since they helped send down the chicken-passing penguin larcenist Feathers McGraw in The Wrong Trousers (1993). Now, Feathers is still doing time; newspaper cuttings on his zoo cell wall suggest he has not let bygones be bygones. As for Wallace, he has lost none of his ingenuity for devising labour-saving contraptions and gained no guile or self-knowledge. Not for the first time, Gromit faces displacement from his master’s side by Wallace’s latest wayward brainchild: Norbot, a smart-gnome gardening robot (voiced by Reece Shearsmith) .

All, then, is reliably familiar in West Wallaby Street, Wigan, and indeed in Aardman studios, where Nick Park and his crack corps of plasticine modellers have honed another marvel of homespun mayhem and northern burlesque undergirded by iron-strength irony. Park and Mark Burton’s screenplay builds from quaint kitsch and parochial policing in the manner of Hot Fuzz (2007) to a canal boat chase through the Lancashire-Yorkshire hinterlands and high peril on the Pontcysyllte aqueduct. Wallace’s dad jokes, and Park’s wider verbal whimsies and doodles, are still bounteous, though the saucy double entendres seem to have been sent into retirement. And Ben Whitehead makes a fair fist of replacing the late Peter Sallis as the voice of Wallace. 

What lifts Vengeance Most Fowl above self pastiche is the return of Feathers, and the very contemporary tech vulnerabilities he exploits to jailbreak Norbot and raise an army of diabolical, red-pointy-hatted minions. (Those hats are tipped, most obviously, to Snow White’s helper dwarfs in Disney’s 1937 animation, before the gremlins and the devil-dolls break out; in their campy comic surrealism the gnomebots also recall Danny DeVito’s underground penguin partisans in Batman Returns, 1992.) Amid the hullabaloo, poker-faced, ice-cool Feathers plays the long game. He almost thaws in the high-wire hacking scene – a showpiece of comic suspense – but otherwise remains an inscrutable string-pulling villain, his motives as black as his eyes. Only Gromit, his rival dumb animal and wise mime, sees him clearly. The rest of us are willing patsies and prattling puppets.

► Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is screening on BBC IPlayer on Christmas Day.