A mobile game most people use to pass time on the toilet is not the ripest material for cinematic adaptation. The writers of The Angry Birds Movie know this, and their solution is to throw as many jokes as they can at the screen in the hope that a few of them stick.

The result is a bright, colourful and mercifully brief blur of PG-friendly Family Guy cutaway gags and cringe-inducing puns involving birds and pigs. Hatchlings in the audience will be in stitches, but grownups might find themselves itching to play with their phones to pass the time.

There are far worse videogame adaptations than The Angry Birds Movie, but it commits the cardinal sin of animated films: it treats its young audience as an excuse for laziness.

RATING: 2/5

INFORMATION

CAST: Jason Sudeikis, Bill Hader, Daniel McBride, Josh Gad, Maya Rudolph, Peter Dinklage

DIRECTORS: Clay Kaytis & Fergal Reilly

WRITER: Jon Vitti

SYNOPSIS: When an island populated by happy flightless birds is visited by mysterious green piggies, it’s up to three unlikely outcasts – Red, Chuck and Bomb – to figure out what the pigs are up to.