Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Troop Zero’ on Amazon Prime, an Indie Comedy That’ll Test Your Twee Tolerance

Troop Zero arrives on Amazon Prime almost a year after its Sundance debut, and it’s very much in the stereotypical vein of the film festival: modest-budgeted indie, buoyed by a bankable star or two, will significantly test the meddle of anyone with a twee allergy. Directed by Bert and Bertie (a.k.a. Katie Ellwood and Amber Templemore-Finlayson), the film promises to be stylish, sentimental and clever. But will it be just clever enough, or too clever for its own good?

TROOP ZERO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Mckenna Grace plays a straggly-haired moppet whose mother passed away; they shared a passion for staring up at the stars and dreaming hard. Sad story, for sure. Now hold on, because here comes all the shit that’s funny: The girl’s name is Christmas Flint, her hapless dad is known as Bossman (Jim Gaffigan) and they live in the fictional town of Wiggly, Georgia. Christmas has a reputation for being the weirdo who wets herself. When she learns that the Birdie Scout organization is holding a talent show and the winners will participate in an audio recording being shot into outer space to hopefully be heard by any intelligent life out there, she’s inspired to organize her own troop, and subsequently gathers a ragtag group of misfits including: the local bully Hell-No (Milan Ray), a borderline-feral girl named Smash (Johanna Colon), the one-eyed Jesus freak Anne-Claire (Bella Higginbotham) and her best friend Joseph (Charlie Shotwell), who’s a boy showing some sexual ambiguity and skill for hairdressing, and therefore doesn’t mind wearing the yellow onesie-with-sash uniform. They are — trumpets aloft! — Troop Zero. Because all the other numbers are taken, all the way to a quadrillion and infinity I’m sure.

I’m breathing heavy just typing this. It continues. Their troop “mama” is Miss Rayleen (Viola Davis); she’s the other employee in Bossman’s two-person law firm run out of the Flints’ mobile home, and has become Christmas’ reluctant default mother figure. Bossman’s lost every case ever, but he just keeps on tryin’, and it’s Miss Rayleen’s job to keep him from being flaky as a perfectly baked tilapia fillet. Christmas fends off the mean girls, who are the most perfectest Birdies, and they get away with making fun of the bedwetter and the one-eyed girl and the gay kid because it’s 1977, and because they’re led by Miss Massey (Allison Janney), the supercilious school principal who probably was beaten with a switch for having an eyelash out of place in finishing school, and that’s why she ended up this way.

And so Troop Zero must legitimize itself by earning badges in order to be invited to the Birdie jamboree and talent show. Will this group of spazzes and freakazoids get its shit together enough to sell cookies and bake cakes and spend the night in the woods? Will Miss Rayleen overcome her cynicism to keep them focused? Will I even mention Mike Epps’ character, who has no apparent purpose but is in the movie anyway? And will we be able to survive the avalanche of quirk and dig out the humanity beneath?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bert and Bertie (see, even the directors have cutesy names) are aiming for a Wes Anderson-helming-Bad News Bears blend of visual adroitness and nonconformist characters.

Performance Worth Watching: This movie is T-ball for hardballers Viola Davis and Allison Janney. But without them, Troop Zero would be utterly unremarkable. They share a strong-women moment deep in the third act, and their characters briefly become more than the sum of the screenplay’s parts.

Memorable Dialogue: Tell me you don’t want to hear Davis read this line in which her character speaks of herself in the third person: “Smash, I don’t care for the law. Rayleen fin to whoop yo ass.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Troop Zero underscores the idea that it’s never too soon to start dreaming and never too late to stop, the importance of keepin’ on keepin’ on, that you should never be a classist, prejudicial prick and a few other cliches that are so because there’s a kernel of truth to them, and that’s why the greeting card industry is a behemoth. I have a soft spot for movies like this because it’s ambitious, and isn’t a lazy, cynically manufactured big-Hollywood wad of indigestible sentimentality. Sure, it’s overwritten and features characters named Christmas Flint, Hell-No Price and Handmade Gates (OK, that last one is a lie, but is it any less probable?), and it’s so authentically gritty it but if a movie’s greatest crime is trying too hard, do we dismiss it outright?

Nay, I say. Nay. Per my calculations, the thematic obviousness of this lightly manipulative but well-meaning film numerically breaks down to 51 percent truth and 49 percent feelgood blither. So when the ending that we see coming from a light-year away finally comes, we feel something, possibly warmth and possibly against our better judgment. That we’ve ascribed a little piece of ourselves to these characters is not nothing. Resist too much, and we risk being total jerks.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Troop Zero may be cloying, but it has an earnest heart.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Troop Zero on Amazon Prime