Sometimes you have to accept that no matter how well intentioned, your idea for a movie is really, really bad. You want to shout: “Leonardo da Vinci is the most underrated human in history!” I’m with you. He was brilliant in so many branches of art and science that it’s hard to believe he predates calculus. You want to say, “It’s a shame that he’s currently known as either the next-best Leonardo or simply the namesake of a ninja turtle.” I’m with you. The man was as brilliant as men get and, often, the best we can do is make his name a puzzle for Tom Hanks to solve. That’s not how we should honor arguably the greatest mind ever created.
But I tell you what: we also shouldn’t honor him with a lifeless stop-motion animation biography of the last two years of his life, either.
In 1513, painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, architect, and aspiring ninja turtle Leonardo da Vinci (voice of Stephen Fry) became part of the Pope’s entourage, which is quite a coup. Apparently. Pope Leo X (Matt Berry) had da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo all hangin’ around Vatican City. I’m guessing Donatello was out getting pizza or something. According to the film, da Vinci was coaxed to join the court of conqueror Francis I (Gauthier Battoue) of France. The film’s dates are off for a bit regarding this stuff –for instance, Michelangelo has finished the Sistine Chapel before da Vinci arrived—but who besides me would actually check, huh?
The egotistical Francis I thought having da Vinci around making Frank-I art would give him a street cred unknown to fellow despots Henry VIII and Charles V. FWIW, the film found absolutely no difference among the men other than basic appearance. So the film took us through da Vinci’s exodus from the Pope and into his vision of the “ideal city” he was unable to finish.
The Inventor displayed a fair amount of da Vinci’s intellectual curiosity – if giving a running laundry list of cool things we attribute to da Vinci can be called such- but engaged with very little of the man’s actual brilliance. In the film, The Inventor often comes off as distant dreamer much more than intellectual monster. The biggest controversy comes over da Vinci’s desire to play M.E. with the recently deceased. (Apparently, this proclivity had to be hidden from his patrons.) Unfortunately, this made da Vinci look like out-of-touch doddering fool rather than ahead-of-his-time scientist.
That can’t possibly be what you wanted, writer/director Jim Capobianco, could it?
The problem with all of this is that da Vinci was 65 in 1517 when the film begins. He died in 1519 and achieved 
extremely little of what we remember him for during that time. Hence, going over his greatest hits, as it were, feels like name-dropping. The theme of the film is da Vinci discovering the meaning of life, which would be a big deal, I suppose, if it seemed genuine and not cliché. Unfortunately, it comes off as both here and at a time when the film had already bored me silly. “That’s your message, boss? Great. I’m outta here.”
I believe there is a great movie about da Vinci within human endeavor. It will be a film much like Amadeus in which we explore the man’s genius and achievement while accepting that he was subject to the same kind of mundane and petty influences that all humans are subject to. This wasn’t it. This came off more as a half-assed education film in “fun” stop-motion animation while we all explore perhaps the two most boring years of the man’s life. Basically, take the absolute worst Schoolhouse Rock! video you’ve seen, stretch it from two minutes to two hours and you’re quite close to whatever happened here.
There once live a mind famously fertile
Soaring over any intellectual hurdle
Last Supper, Mona Lisa…
Did he invent all of Pisa?
And now we honor him as a ninja turtle
Rated PG, 100 Minutes
Director: Jim Capobianco, Pierre-Luc Granjon
Writer: Jim Capobianco
Genre: Movies that even kids will find boring
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: I wanna say “Leonardo da Vinci,” but my guess is even he would find this film lacking
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Looks like me
