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| photo courtesy of theemoji-movie.com |
SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
In The
Emoji Movie, “meh” emoji Gene (T.J. Miller) lives inside the smartphone of
a teenage boy named Alex. But unlike the other emojis, Gene doesn’t feel how he
should: he expresses a whole range of emotions. After failing to deliver a “meh”
when Alex needs it, Gene finds himself on the run from head emoji Smiler (Maya
Rudolph) and her army of sinister “bots.” Together with Hi-5 (James Corden) and
Jailbreak (Anna Faris), it’s up to Gene to find a way to the Cloud, learn how
to be himself, and discover the meaning of friendship.
That
summary was very generous, because the rumors are true: The Emoji Movie is an absolute clunker. How to describe it best… A
tone-deaf marketing ploy? A string of dad jokes draped over a threadbare plot? Altogether
depressing? All of the above?
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| photo courtesy of slashfilm.com |
When you propose a movie with such a
ridiculous premise, you’ve got to be willing to work some serious magic to make
it work. Take The Lego Movie. The Lego Movie could easily have been a
colossal failure, but against all its odds it managed to be a tremendous
success by combining its own unique brand of humor with a heartwarming message.
The Emoji Movie makes no discernable
effort to clear either of those bars. I want to feel bad for Sony’s ailing
movie division, but when they mail it in like this, it’s hard to be
sympathetic.
The Emoji Movie simply isn’t funny. Sighs and
groans easily outnumber laughs. There are definite attempts at humor, but for
the most part they rely on low-hanging fruit (see all of Patrick Stewart’s lines
as his character, Poop). Perhaps most damningly, the script seems to borrow all
its jokes from other places. There’s nothing that we haven’t seen or heard
before.
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| photo courtesy of nytimes.com |
The story, meanwhile, is another hodge-podge
of elements from better movies: The Lego
Movie, Wreck-It Ralph, Inside Out, etc. It’s not the worst ever—and
frequent change of settings helps to keep things fresh—but it simply can’t
sustain the weight of 1) characters that are only barely sketched out and 2) dialogue
that occasionally ranks among the worst I’ve seen in recent memory. Only Maya
Rudolph’s villain stirs up any real interest.
And for a movie that has teenagers at
its core, The Emoji Movie is
surprisingly out of touch with… everyone. Alex, the central teenager, never uses
the eggplant emoji and is apparently the only teenage boy ever to have the
(Sony-owned) Crackle app downloaded on his smartphone (chalk that last one up
to the movie’s egregious, commonplace, and unabashed product placement).
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| photo courtesy of vox.com |
The intended moral of the story, meanwhile,
tells us that sending a more expressive emoji counts as “expressing your
feelings,” which gives the teenage/child audience the absolute opposite idea of
what constitutes a meaningful interaction. Unlike The Lego Movie or Inside Out,
it feels like The Emoji Movie is afraid
to move past its component parts (in this case, admit the obvious limitations
of emojis). The result is a conclusion that is more depressing than
heartwarming.
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| photo courtesy of abcnews.go.com |
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