Bobos — Sneaks

Oh the things I do for love… at least, the love of animation. As previously mentioned, I’m taking a super aggressive stance this year in seeing as many animated films as possible, so that come November/December, when the Academy releases its list of Animated Feature candidates, I can clear the entire thing for the first time ever. Part of that means taking in just about any potential submission, including ones that have little to no box office impact as well as ones that are objectively bad.

Sneaks is both. After three weeks in theatres, the film has yet to gross even $1 million despite playing on over 1,500 screens nationwide. This is the true definition of a bomb, and that’s without even knowing the production budget. Given the star-studded cast, it was probably a lot, and Briarcliff Entertainment will never see any of it back. That’s because the movie is a completely uninspired ripoff, filled with cheap animation, horrendous shoe puns, and no actual story or message. To take in Sneaks is to surrender yourself to the laziest of covertly branded content, a form of self-induced penance for mocking other movies that were merely mediocre. After seeing what may be the best film of the year just a few days prior, my next cinematic experience was decidedly the worst so far in 2025, a metaphorical step into a pile of doggie doo that I can’t scrape off my soles. With every passing frame of its pandering banality, you yearn for the intellectual credibility and production values of The Emoji Movie.

If the headline of this review confuses you, allow me to elucidate. While I’m sure there are other connotations, when I was a kid in the 90s, “bobos” was a slang term describing inexpensive or knockoff sneakers. It was one of the many ways that kids could denigrate one another, essentially shaming them for not having parents rich or foolhardy enough to shell out $150 for Nikes. If you were like me and shopped at Payless or Buster Brown (remember Buster Brown?), you were greeted on the bus each morning by the following jingle set to the tune of the “Colonel Bogey March” (just google it, you’ll recognize it):

Bobos, they make your feet feel fine!
Bobos, they cost $1.99.
Bobos, they are for hobos,
So hang ’em up over your power line!

This is one of the many reasons why I never got into so-called “shoe culture.” Shoes are meant to cover and protect your feet. That’s it. Like any clothing they can be used to make a fashion statement, but in social situations, you’re not meant to look down at the floor. Comfort and utility are all that truly matter, and yet there are people who spend thousands of dollars or more on these leathery status symbols, most of the time putting them on display rather than ever wearing them. There are a lot of trends I can respect without being interested, but this isn’t one of them. It’s utterly asinine, and it reinforces this misplaced class discrimination that was ingrained into my peers and I since the age of five. If you didn’t fork over hundreds for something Michael Jordan was paid millions to endorse but was made in a sweatshop by third-world children for pennies, you were somehow less of a person, and you deserved to be bullied and punished for it, to the point that people would, per the song, toss your “bobos” over the electrical lines so that you had no protection as you walked home crying on streets littered with broken glass. The fact that poor urban families, mostly minority, were sold this lie so that they’d spend rent money on the damn things is one of the true moral failings of our society.

So yeah, I can admit to a little bit of bias going in, but I’ll always give something a fair shake, even if it looks like abject crap. I’ve been pleasantly surprised before. Maybe there would be a solid story, a fun adventure, or some kind of grounded reconciliation of fantasy and reality. Anything’s possible, but Sneaks has absolutely no interest in any of that. Instead, the film serves as its own form of cheap fraudulence, mostly aping the likes of Toy Story and Cars, and fails miserably on all fronts. When I’m sitting here defending CARS for its storytelling, you know you done fucked all the way up.

Ostensibly, there’s a human character at the center of all this. Edson, voiced by rapper Swae Lee, is a high school freshman in Manhattan, getting set for his first “Midnight Madness” basketball game, supposedly a crucial step towards his dreams of playing in the NBA. It’s a sad testament to the movie’s quality that when he does play at the end of the film, the game itself is called “Midnight Madness,” but so is his team. No effort put in whatsoever. Anyway, his mother (Kiana Ledé) takes him to a sneaker convention, hyped as “the biggest shoe con this side of the Hudson.” Um, they’re in Manhattan. There are fewer than three miles between the Hudson and the East River and ocean. This statement is not the least bit impressive. While there, Edson runs into a girl he likes named Vanessa (Amirah Hall), who’s running a raffle to win a high profile pair of “Alchemy 24” sneakers (abbreviated to “A24” in dialogue, a swipe at a rival studio that Briarcliff has decidedly not earned) endorsed by Chris Paul appearing in a cameo, because when you need NBA star power, forget about LeBron, Giannis, Luka, or any of the other current greats, you gotta get the guy who hit his peak in 2016.

Edson gets a free ticket for the raffle because he volunteers at the local community center teaching kids to play basketball, which is the closest thing to character development the boy gets. He is then greeted by the “Collector” (Laurence Fishburne, for reasons known but to God), a viral celebrity known for having the largest stockpile of designer shoes in the city. He buys 200 tickets at $100 apiece. You read that right, this man spent $20,000 on a lottery. At the drawing, led by a DJ named Mustard (remember when stage names required thought and imagination?), Edson’s impossible odds pay off, and he gets the shoes, thinking that this will be the moment that changes everything. He’ll be able to wear these to Midnight Madness and become a superstar, rather than risk failure in his current ratty sneakers.

This whole opening sequence shows why this movie can’t work, and just how craven it is in its cynical messaging. There is no shoe on the planet worth $20k. I don’t care if they’re attached to Anna Kendrick as her only form of clothing while she’s contractually obligated to give me a daily rimjob. That sort of price is never justified, especially when the shoes were likely made in near slave conditions. After Edson wins, the Collector accosts him outside and offers him even more to simply buy the shoes off him, including insane guarantees like naming rights to stadiums and shit. No foot covering is worth that much, and it’s even dumber when Edson repeatedly turns him down. They’re butt ugly high tops with tiny gems hot glued on, and you’re turning down potentially millions? You could literally buy out an entire Foot Locker for what he’s offering, and you’re somehow NOT going to take advantage of that stupidity? The hell is wrong with you?

The answer is that the film perpetuates the myth that basketball shoes can overcome a lack of skill and make you magically better at the game itself. This is laid bare in the first scene of the movie, where a nameless, faceless kid covers himself with a hoodie and tags the city with spraypaint. Eventually there’s a reveal of the title card as if it’s a graffiti mural, but the tagger clearly wasn’t making one. He was just spraying every surface within walking distance, including stop signs and a cop. That’s not art, that’s criminal vandalism. All the while, the title song from the soundtrack plays in the background, which contains some of the most insipid lyrics this side of Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” After multiple repetitions of “Jordan, Kobe, Kobe, LeBron, Shaq, Jordan,” the chorus gives us the oh so poetic refrain of “My sneaks can do anything/When I say ‘anything,’ I mean anything.” Oh really? Can your “sneaks” negotiate a hostage situation? Can they cook a delicious meal? Can they reach the Donkey Kong kill screen? No? They can’t? WELL THEN THEY CAN’T DO “ANYTHING,” YOU MORON! SHUT THE FUCK UP!

It’s all part of this complete corporate falsehood that hoop stars are made from their outfits. We had “It’s gotta be the shoes” with Spike Lee as far back as 1989, but it’s always been an ad campaign rather than anything resembling reality. Michael Jordan was already ridiculously talented, as were all the players name dropped in the song. The shoes only made them rich in the sense that signing the endorsement deals made them millions, but their actual skills on the court were already well-established, which is why they were offered the deals in the first place. No matter what you put on your feet, if you’re 5'6″ and can’t hit a layup, you won’t be a pro baller. The fact that we continue to push this lie on impressionable youths is societal malpractice, and the fact that so much of it is targeted at poor and minority children so that they hang their hopes of social mobility on the one-in-a-million chance at sports stardom is essentially a form of systemic class and racial oppression.

Just within the narrow context of the film, however, this first act begs the question of what Edson’s plan was if he didn’t win the magical raffle he didn’t know about when he went into the convention. As a trio of shoes hanging from a wire narrates (Mustard, Young Miko, and Donovan Louis Bazemore — less a Greek chorus and more parents being forced to explain to their kids what the hell is going on), this is meant to be a turning point in Edson’s life, and the life of kicks everywhere, but it makes no sense. Edson thinks he needs new shoes because his old ones are falling apart, but he waits until the literal day of his first game AND he stakes everything on a drawing that he had no knowledge of before it happened. His mother even mentions later that she can afford to get him new shoes, and yet he refuses. What exactly is this kid’s motivation, and why should I care what happens to him?

After trying on his prize pair in his apartment, Edson scuffs one of them, and dejectedly places them on a shelf in his living room, because I guess a single smudge removes all their basketball superpowers. He and his mom go off to run errands, during which time the Collector and his dog somehow climb up his building and break into the place to steal them (“kicknapped” as it’s called, one of dozens of legitimately painful instances of shoe-based wordplay that this movie thinks are actual jokes). The shoes come to life, with one of them, Ty (because you TIE YOUR SHOES! DO YOU GET IT?!?!?!?!?!), voiced by Anthony Mackie, being happy for the abduction, because it means they’ll get a “proper” life of being worshipped as trophies, but his sister Maxine (Chloe Bailey) tries to escape because she wants to be worn and experienced by Edson. In the ensuing ride through the city, the two are separated, with Ty being tossed out of the box and Maxine going to the Collector’s penthouse crib. Apparently the Collector has his own boss, the “Forger” (Roddy Ricch), who wants the Alchemy shoes so he can tear them apart to make bootleg replicas. Somehow, “bootleg” is never used in a lame pun, the one footwear-related word in the dictionary that was spared. So with both shoes in the opposite situation than what they wanted, Maxine works with the Collector’s other shoes to find a way out, while Ty has to make his way back to his sister in order to get the cushy life he envisioned.

In order to do this, Ty randomly encounters a street hustler shoe called J.B. (Martin Lawrence), who agrees to help in exchange for the aforementioned “bling” that decorates Ty’s surface. Every clog and high heel that they meet, from an old sneaker named O.G. (Keith David) to a pump that J.B. used to somehow date (Macy Gray), tells Ty that J.B. is no good and that he’s being played, but Ty goes along with it anyway, ostensibly to find Maxine, but also to satisfy what this movie thinks of as a lesson about expanding your horizons and not being afraid to put yourself out there (and also to set up an obvious “liar revealed” third act conflict). He even picks up his own stiletto love interest in the form of Britany (Ella Mai).

This is simultaneously far too much plotting and not nearly enough. First of all, how are Ty and Maxine brother and sister? How are any of the pairs of shoes siblings? Why are some single sex and others male and female? What even defines gender in a shoe? Why is Ty disgusted about the idea of Edson “put[ting] his feet in me” when that’s his literal purpose? When it comes to their design, why do these shoes, which have “tongues” as part of their actual assembly, talk out of the toe portion with wholly separate, moving tongues? Why is one pair of shoes attached to a skateboard as a makeshift Uber? How and why do these shoes fuck each other? Why did I not take ALL THE DRUGS before watching this? None of this is addressed in the slightest, and yet we’re subjected to a shoe with theatrical dreams who starred in the classic Shakespeare play Much ADIDAS About Nothing and Keith David being forced to say, “We don’t talk around here, we CONVERSE!” Kill me. Kill me now. Kill me fast. Resurrect me, then kill me again.

All of this brain rot is bathed in some of the most slapdash and unconvincing animation imaginable. The human characters have no design parameters other than “nightmare fuel” (seriously, look at the poster shot of Edson smiling above), the film romanticizes New York in one moment but then depicts Central Park at night as just a sea of monstrous rats, the literal frame rate drops several times, making the film look like it’s a lagging cutscene in a video game, and from one scene to the next, it can’t decide whether it wants to imitate a comic book style like Spider-Verse or The Last Wish, or just do a lazy impersonation of Illumination doing a lazy impersonation of Pixar. I swear to God there are scenes that make Rapsittie Street Kids look like high art.

The closest thing I can give to a compliment is that towards the end, the flick almost tries to have a moral. In the end, Edson really does just want to wear the shoes, play in them, and chase his ambitions. That is at least marginally more tolerable than the typical “Sneakerhead” mantra of just putting the damn things in cases to show off as if they’re meant to be collector’s items rather than something your feet are supposed to sweat into and not get cut up in. But even then, the message falls completely flat, because Edson’s old shoes are not anthropomorphized like the others. Every other shoe we focus on, young or old, comes to life and has a personality (or at least the assertion of one), but not the ones he’s wearing for 95% of the film. They are disposable, replaceable, and never get a say in their own fate. That essentially makes this movie into one about forcing obsolescence on the unloved when something more flashy comes along, turning a potential good idea into something even more crass than an actual sneaker being cut in half and screaming because it’s still alive, which happens about 2/3 of the way in.

That’s fucked up. The movie wants us to embrace the idea of a whimsical adventure, love something that’s a part of our everyday lives, and wonder what it would be like if they had lives of their own. Yet at the most crucial point of that thought experiment, the whole thing is abandoned in favor of manipulative and exploitative capitalism. The moment something outlives its usefulness, it’s not only unworthy of acknowledgement, but it should be unceremoniously defenestrated in favor of the shinier new model. Disgusting. I wasn’t exactly expecting Spirited Away here, but Sneaks undercuts what little potential it had by embracing criminality, force feeding patronizing tautologies, pandering and advertising directly to young people who don’t know any better (the amount of product placement here is obscene) whose parents may not be able to afford to accommodate, and then outright telling them to throw out anything with sentimental value if it doesn’t have novel monetary value. In the end it becomes its own cautionary tale, warning audiences of cheap imitations while actively ripping off the genuine article films that made it possible. Curb stomp this piece of shit.

Grade: F

Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? What’s the worst animated film you’ve ever seen? What other inanimate objects are going to be brought to life in a cartoon? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!

Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on May 3, 2025.