Dwyane Johnson is one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood today, but even he couldn’t save this 2009 animated feature that just hit free streaming. The actor has carved out an incredibly successful career as a global movie star, leading critically acclaimed and blockbuster movies and franchises like Fast & Furious, Moana, Jumanji, and Stuntman. Back in the earlier days of his career, the actor led an animated sci-fi comedy that flopped both critically and commercially to become one of his worst movies yet – and fans can now rediscover it.
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With just a 23% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and a $105 box office haul against a $70 million budget, Planet 51 is the fourth-lowest-rated movie of Johnson’s career and sits in the bottom half of his box office rankings. The movie, also featuring the voice acting of Justin Long, Jessica Biel, Gary Oldman, Seann William Scott, John Cleese, and Freddie Benedict, started streaming for free on Tubi on January 1st. It stars Johnson as Captain Charles T. “Chuck” Baker, an astronaut who lands on the presumably uninhabited alien Planet 51, only to discover it is inhabited by little green people who live in an idyllic version of 1950s America and have a deep-seated fear of humans.
Dwayne Johnson’s Planet 51 Is a Missed Opportunity
Planet 51’s Tomatometer score is pretty abysmal, with critics calling it a film that is “about as dull as a dirty penny” and “dares you to stay awake.” Audiences were a bit kinder to the film, handing it a 40% Popcornmeter score, and we tend to agree that it may be at least a bit better than that disastrous critic rating. When it comes down to it, so much of what is bad about Planet 51 is all of the opportunities it missed.
The film has a genuinely interesting concept that essentially flips the script on the alien invader storyline, presenting a human, rather than the little green people, as the invader, but it fails to deliver. Despite the clever twist, the film’s fish-out-of-water story feels far too familiar and unoriginal, the movie never really bringing anything new to the table and never exploring the interesting world-building. Planet 51 also presented the perfect opportunity for sharp satire and parody of 1950s sci-fi paranoia and culture but ultimately fell back onto potty humor and tired pop-culture references that are underwhelming for children and adults alike. Even the characters ended up being uninteresting and underdeveloped. Plant 51 does have some great animation and a few heartwarming moments, but it’s solidly an average, if not disappointing, movie with a great premise that wasn’t fully realized in the final product.
Other Family-Friendly Movies Now on Tubi
Tubi is a great resource for inexpensive family movie nights in. In addition to Planet 51, the platform’s free streaming library added other kid-friendly movies in January like Bandslam, Earth to Echo, Jumanji, The Ant Bully, and Where The Wild Things Are, giving families plenty of new streaming options.
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