GOAT
★★ 1/2
Our family must have really been craving a trip to the theater, because normally, a lower-budget animated movie like GOAT probably wouldn’t be one we’d rush out to see. But we’re a basketball family, and attaching Stephen Curry’s name to the marketing absolutely worked on us.
So we grabbed the popcorn and gave it a shot.
I’ll be honest: it took me a while to get on board with this one.
For probably the entire first half of the movie, I was pretty disengaged. The jokes weren’t landing for me, and several of the characters just didn’t click. Even the iguana character, Modo, voiced by Nick Kroll — who I usually enjoy — felt more annoying than funny early on.
But somewhere around the midpoint, something shifted.
The tone didn’t drastically change, but the movie started to feel more focused and intentional. It began leaning harder into the sports movie formula, and honestly, those clichés exist for a reason. When the story finally embraces the underdog basketball narrative, that’s when the film starts to find its rhythm.
One thing that stood out to me, though, is just how fast everything moves. The movie is extremely flashy and kinetic, almost to a fault. It throws so much at the screen that moments and punchlines sometimes get lost in the chaos. After the movie ended, our family actually compared notes and realized we had all missed different jokes because there was simply so much happening visually.
The animation style clearly takes inspiration from the bold visual approach popularized by another Sony Studios vehicle, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. That influence is obvious. But you can also feel that GOAT is working with a smaller budget. On the big screen, the depth-of-field effects were sometimes a little distracting, and in wide crowd shots, you could spot repeated character models, one of those animation shortcuts that’s harder to hide when everything is blown up on a theater screen.
That said, the movie eventually wins you over where it matters most: the sports.
If you’re a sucker for sports movie tropes, and I absolutely am, GOAT starts to deliver once it leans into teamwork, perseverance and the love of the game. By the time the final act rolled around, I found myself enjoying it quite a bit more than I expected.
It’s clearly chasing some of the anthropomorphic-animal charm of Zootopia, but the humor isn’t quite as clever. Still, the basketball sequences do a solid job of capturing the cool factor of the sport and why people fall in love with it.
I actually started this movie thinking I might really dislike it… and ended up walking out thinking it was pretty good.
It’s not something you need to sprint to the theater to see, and it’s not reinventing the animated sports movie. But it delivers enough laughs, heart and family-friendly themes about teamwork and belonging that it works well as a family outing.
And sometimes, that’s exactly what a movie needs to do.
