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The Emoji Movie
STARRING: T J Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris, Patrick Stewart
DIRECTOR: Tony Leondis
Genre: Animation
Rating: PG
RUNNING TIME: 86 minutes
From the sublime to the ridiculous, in just over a week. In my last column, I pledged that we wouldn’t see a better film this year than Dunkirk, and here I am a week later proclaiming that we won’t see a worse film in 2017 than The Emoji Movie. And that’s coming from someone who sat through Baywatch!
Three years ago, The LEGO Movie - what seemed like on the surface to be nothing more than a cheap cash grab – turned out to be a brilliant smash-hit. So going into The Emoji Movie this week, I felt a similar trepidation as I did going into that 2014 animated adventure, but I also had a sense of optimistic belief, knowing that there was a chance The Emoji Movie could prove me wrong.
For the first twenty minutes or so of the film too, The Emoji Movie manages to explain the seemingly unexplainable life of an Emoji on the big screen in mildly interesting ways. With references to the ‘favourite Emojis club’ and how strange combinations of Emojis can even amuse the Emojis themselves, the film shows it has the potential to be a legitimately entertaining ride through a teenager’s smartphone. But as the narrative ticks by, it reveals itself to be just as misguided and nonsensical an endeavour as many assumed it would be when it was originally announced.
Based on the titular Emojis ‘living’ inside of your smartphone, The Emoji Movie takes place in Textopolis, a digital city where all of a phone’s respective Emojis live, and where they spend every day ready and waiting to be scanned for a text message by their phone’s owner - in this case, a high school freshman named Alex (Jake T Austin).
But in a city where every Emoji is expected to only act and feel like their assigned emotions - Mr Poop (Patrick Stewart, who I assume took this role because he is still suffering from the same cerebral haemorrhages that plagued him in Logan) can only make toilet jokes, and Smiler (Maya Rudolph) can never stop smiling - the film introduces us to the one Emoji who’s unable to act that restricted.
This is Gene (T J Miller), a ‘Meh’ Emoji who just can’t contain the excitement he feels about living in Textopolis, and as such, becomes recognised as a social outcast among his peers.
Things go from bad to worse, however, when Gene goes against the advice of his perfectly ‘Meh’ parents, and gets scanned as the wrong Emoji by Alex, making him be labelled as a malfunction by the other Emojis. As he goes on the run from antivirus bots determined to delete him from the phone, Gene journeys to find a hacker named Jailbreak (Anna Faris), who may be able to fix his source code in the Cloud and effectively turn him into the perfect ‘Meh.’
One of the biggest problems with The Emoji Movie is that, whether intentional or not, the film feels like a very odd grab bag of elements lifted directly from many other successful animated films from the past few years. It has several of the same on-the-nose castings that helped The LEGO Movie to stand out, and unsuccessfully attempts to recreate that film’s breakneck pace and comedic style.
It takes a similar approach to the virtual world and lives of its characters as Disney’s Wreck-it-Ralph did, and attempts to convey the same message as Pixar’s brilliant Inside Out, without any of that film’s emotional insight or subtlety.
The film clearly has a desire to say something about the modern day world, whether that be the increasing lack of complex emotional discussion between people - when conversations nowadays can just be comprised of smiley faces and digital high-fives. But while those are admirable desires, the film doesn’t actually follow through on any of its own commentary. Instead, The Emoji Movie acts like just bringing these points up will be enough, and turns on those ideals without a second thought the moment it needs to start wrapping things up.
For adults, its inability to deliver emotionally or thematically keeps it from ever feeling like a worthwhile experience, and for kids … well, it’s just plain boring with surprisingly few laughs, even of the slapstick variety. Even visually, it pales in comparison to its LEGO or Pixar counterparts.
Ultimately, despite the talents and charisma of its voice cast, The Emoji Movie fails to deliver in any aspect and simply appears to be a particularly expensive advert for smartphones. Now, where did I put my thumbs down Emoji?
Showing at: TBA
Rating: 1/5
