Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile film review — singing reptile story lacks X factor

Just like last year’s Clifford the Big Red Dog, this utterly insane but oddly endearing family feature revamps an old piece of kids’ intellectual property — in this case, Bernard Waber’s early 1960s books The House on East 88th Street and Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile. The action (directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck) is relocated to present-day New York in a mix of real actors and digital fauna. This means 106 minutes of watching Javier Bardem, Constance Wu and Scoot McNairy mugging, gurning and capering about as they pretend to react to the antics of a human-sized bipedal crocodile named Lyle, who doesn’t talk but does sing with the smooth, radio-friendly voice of pop star Shawn Mendes.

The key conceit is that Bardem’s shadowy huckster Hector P Valenti has tried to turn Lyle into a singing sensation via a TV talent show, but the shy semiaquatic creature gets terrible stage fright and can never sing at the crucial moment. Valenti’s solution is to abandon his large lizard, leaving him alone in an Upper East Side apartment to be discovered by Josh (Winslow Fegley), the nerdy son of Mr and Mrs Primm (McNairy and Wu respectively).

A scene where Josh tries to talk Mrs Primm into letting him keep Lyle as a pet, arguing that this man-eating reptile is different because he wears a scarf, is magnificent. So is Brett Gelman (Fleabag, Stranger Things) as the kvetching neighbour from hell with a cute digital Persian cat named Loretta. But that’s not quite enough to pull the whole thing out of the uncanny valley of weirdly animated digital beasties and misbegotten concepts.

★★★☆☆

In UK and US cinemas from October 14