Woody Woodpecker(2017)

Thanks to Woody’s acts of sabotage and destruction, the construction of Lance’s (Timothy Omundson) country estate falls behind schedule and over budget, plus his fiancée Vanessa (Thaila Ayala) breaks up with him and returns to Seattle. The day after Vanessa has left, Lance hires the exterminators Nate & Otis Grimes (Scott McNeil & Adrian Glynn McMorran) (who are actually the bird poachers troubling the area and also taxidermy their kills) to trap Woody and release him in a far off location, and they take the job because they know they can sell him for a hefty sum since his species is thought to be extinct. However, when the brothers and Lance attempt to catch Woody the following morning, he outsmarts them and puts a hurting on them.

Lance then decides to follow Ranger Samantha’s (Jordana Largy) advice on being nice to Woody, so he calls for a truce with him and makes a deal where he will give him a box of peanut butter snacks every day in return for being able to finish his house in peace. By the end of the month, the exterior work on the house is completed, and since he had already befriended Woody and liked how Lance ceased hostilities with him, Tommy (Graham Verchere) finally shows his father some respect. A day or two later, Tommy is set to perform a song at the Firefly Festival with Jill (Chelsea Miller) and Lyle (Jakob Davies), but Woody ends up filling in for Lyle on the drums out of everyone’s view after Lyle makes himself sick from doing the hot dog eating contest. Afterwards, Woody introduces himself to Samantha while she is hanging with Lance and Tommy, and Tommy brings up that Woody was the mystery drummer.

Woody then heads back to the house, and he soon entertains the thought of having Lance and Tommy stick around, believing that he has been alone for too long. He therefore pecks a portrait of himself with them on one of the walls in the house, but when he tries to sign it, his beak accidentally hits an exposed wire, starting a fire that burns down the house. After seeing the charred remains and getting told by a firefighter that an animal had likely hit the wiring, Lance angrily concludes that Woody deliberately did this, so he hires back Nate and Otis. Lance first has a backhoe come in and push down Woody’s tree home, and when Woody climbs out, he is tased by the Grimes brothers and tossed into a cage. Tommy tries to warn his father about how he, Jill, and Lyle earlier found out that Nate and Otis are taxidermists and will likely kill and stuff Woody, but after the brothers swear that they will release him elsewhere, Lance lets them drive off with the bird. Tommy angrily tells his father that he won’t forgive him for this, and then accuses him of always getting rid of anything that bothers him, such as himself and his mother. He then immediately goes into town and heads into the curio shop where Jill works, and he fills her and Lyle in on Woody’s capture. Lance then finds Woody’s portrait and realizes that the fire was an accident, so he goes into town and locates Samantha and tells her of what he just did to Woody and how his son is upset with him about it. When she asks if Tommy will try to save him, he responds that he might just do that, so she takes him to the Grimes brothers’ barn home.

As Nate and Otis are auctioning Woody off to four multi-millionaires via video chat, Tommy, Jill, and Lyle sneak into their home hoping to free Woody. However, they are soon caught and thrown into cages themselves. After the auction has concluded, Nate goes to poison Woody, but Otis alerts him to the arrival of Lance and Samantha, so they go out and talk to them. Lance asks them if they have seen Tommy, and they say they haven’t, and then he tells them that he wants Woody back because he makes his son happy, but they reply that they already released him somewhere else. Samantha then notices a candy bar wrapper on the ground identical to the ones she has been finding near poaching sites, and realizing that Nate and Otis are the bird poachers, she tells Lance that they have to leave to find Tommy. As they reach the end of the driveway, she shows Lance a wrapper she already has and informs him that it serves as proof that the brothers are the poachers and they must still have Woody. They enter the barn and see what has become of Woody and the kids, but the Grimes brothers put them in cages, too.

Samantha warns Nate that she has already called for the sheriff to come here, but Nate replies that, by the time he arrives, they will have already fled to Canada with the money from the auction. Just as Nate prepares to shoot Woody with a poison dart, Lance tilts his cage over so he can unlock the top of Woody’s cage, and he flies out and proceeds to administer a beatdown to Nate and Otis. After Woody gives Tommy the keys to his cage, the sheriff’s approaching sirens are heard, and Nate and Otis flee down a logging trail to a closed-down border crossing with Woody in pursuit. They get across, but Woody intercepts them at a bridge above a river and pecks out the bottom where they stand, causing them to fall into the drink. They swim up to the American side of the river and find Samantha, the sheriff, his deputies, and then Woody waiting for them, and now frightened of Woody, the brothers allow themselves to be arrested.

A day or two later, Lance shows Samantha and Tommy a photo of the new home he plans to build that will be smaller and far less garish than the first house, and he presents Woody with a birdhouse on a support stilt to replace his tree. That night, Woody carves “home sweet home” into the stilt, but he makes it too thin at the base and causes it to fall onto Lance and Tommy’s tent and wreck it. Woody apologizes to them, then ends the movie with his signature laugh.