This TV movie has stylish animation, and there was clearly ambition here, but the result is an awkwardly-paced, surprisingly dull film.
The plot is simple: Boy genius Dexter travels through time, teams up with 3 of his future selves (young adult Dexter, middle-aged Dexter, and elderly Dexter), and then they stop his rival Mandark from taking over the world.
As an adventure, it's very disappointing. The interesting parts are all told in flashback, so most of the movie is Dexter passively wandering from one setting to the next, just looking at the situation and hearing some horribly tedious explanation about it. They took "time traveling boy genius on a quest to save the world" and made him the most boring character they possibly could.
Mandark is the only other real character in the movie, and he's in "completely generic villain" mode with nothing remotely interesting about him.
The movie basically has 2 notes: occasional action scenes, and lots of long scenes where characters talk and talk and TALK and TALK. This could be OK if the dialogue was funny, but most of it just repeats points that we could already see onscreen, like the writers thought it was a radio play. It's also a problem that a TON of dialogue goes to "young adult Dexter," whose voice is like nails on a chalkboard. I found myself skipping through scenes where the characters droned on and on and on, just wishing that they'd actually do something fun or interesting with the time travel gimmick. The tedious, talky writing was a gigantic misstep that bogs down the entire movie.
The creators put more effort into the action scenes, but even these are dull and forgettable... Dexter runs away from generic baddies, he fights the pretty wimpy Mandark at the end, and he smashes some robots who stand there waiting to be beaten. Action isn't fun when you're defeating such lame bad guys.
For me, the biggest letdown was that Dee Dee is barely in the movie. The original series worked entirely because Dexter and Dee Dee were a great double act who played off each other so well. There's so much you could do with Dee Dee getting involved in a time-traveling adventure! And a stoic character like Dexter *needs* a fun foil, especially in a 50-minute runtime. But since Dee Dee has only one line in the whole film, and it sounds like a recycled sound clip from the show, I'm guessing that her voice actress couldn't take part. It's a real shame.
The creators clearly got the VAs for Dexter's parents to do a couple lines, but they chose not to use those fun characters either. If the series was like a tasty stew of varied flavors, this movie is like a bowl of plain oatmeal.
I honestly wouldn't recommend this movie to fans of the show. Almost everything that made the show fun and great is gone, and the only reason to see this is the animation style. (And honestly, the style peaks in the opening seconds, with a very cool and classy black-and-white sequence of Mandark in silhouette. Nothing else in the movie looks as good as that first part.)
There just isn't much entertainment value here. Only bother watching it if you're really curious, or if you're studying the creators' overall work.
