Yep, it's a review for The Emoji Movie
**This Review contains Spoilers**
It’s dumb.
Well OK I should go into a little more detail than that. First off I would like to say I was able to see this for free so at least I’m not carrying that guilt. Secondly it’s not the worst animated film ever made like critics keep saying it is (that award goes to ‘Food Fight’). If you plan to see it, expect to see a ripoff version of Inside Out but without the Disney level of quality film making. Animation is adequate for the standard American audiences but the writing is just plain awful.
The story is a basic one that we’ve been spoon fed our entire lives. A guy in a world who feels like he doesn’t belong, goes on a journey, decides being unique is OK and becomes the most popular guy in town. That last bit might be a tad under-exaggeration actually. The ending was way, way cheesier than that.
The story focuses on an emoji named Gene who is a ‘meh’ emoji living in a smartphone. It’s his first day on the job to be a ‘meh’ emoji but because he has been inexplicably cursed/gifted with the ability to express every emotion on demand, he does just that after being sent as a text. The kid who owns that smartphone (Alex voiced by Jake Austin), thinking that it’s now broken, takes a very childish approach and decides he needs to delete everything on his phone. But he can’t just hit the factory reset button; he needs to take it to the Apple store so the employees can hit the button for him. During this time, Gene gets banned from the app and goes on a journey to basically find himself. Naturally a stereotypical comic relief character, the High Five emoji, comes along who’s sole purpose in life is to create roadblocks for Gene at every turn. And of course there is a stereotypical token female character, Jailbreak, who is edgy but has a super secret reason on why she’s so edgy. Oh yeah and Sir Patrick Stewart plays a poop emoji where his only lines in the ENTIRE MOVIE are just poop jokes. Seriously, he has like 6 lines total in the whole film and all of them are poop puns.
Strangely, despite Gene being unique in his world, there is nothing really unique about this movie in our world. There are no new pushes or leaps in the animation technology field. No innovative ways to tell the story or risk taking on the writing. There is nothing fresh or new about this movie - it’s just a recycled script with a batch of one-dimensional characters with no real depth to them. Oh and there were the puns. My god, so many puns in this movie! If there is a drinking game where you have to take a sip every time a pun is said, you will die before the second act.
What’s worse is that the puns aren’t even that funny or clever. A fist bump emoji walks by, somebody says, “oh hey look, it’s fist bump - he’s such a knucklehead”. Get it? Get it? Because he’s shaped like a fist and has knuckles for a head! A semicolon accidentally gets knocked over and shouts ‘Ouch! My colon!’. Get it?! GET IT?! Because he’s a semi-colon. Lol! Yeah, it was like this for the longest 90 minutes of my life.
The biggest issue I have with this movie is not the puns but the story overall. It’s a kids movie so naturally there should be an easy moral for kids to learn from. I struggle to pinpoint what that overall message was. The most common message I saw in the film was ‘it’s ok to be unique’ however I feel the writers were trying to say another message but failed miserably. I believe they were trying to say that there are multiple ways to express emotions but you need to know how to communicate it properly. Throughout the film, Alex is portrayed as an entitled child with an attitude problem who fails at talking to anyone even through emojis. Towards the end of the movie, he finally has the courage to express his feelings to his crush but he only does so through emojis. I’m not sure if that’s the message I want kids to learn, especially in this day and age. I was hoping more for an ending where Alex puts down his phone and just talks to her. I don’t want to sound too old despite being a millennial myself but I felt this movie was focusing more on how the simple emoji seems to be replacing the way kids are interacting with each other. By limiting the amount of exposure kids have with one another early on, children have a harder time later in life developing relationships and that clearly was shown in the ending.
Now I’m probably digging too deep into this shallow ditch of a movie but that’s probably why this film is as bad as it is. There really is no message and if there was one, the writers some how managed to screw it up by sprinkling in other messages that conflict with each other. The writing was weak, the animation was passable and the voice acting was phoned in (eh, see what I did there?). Overall, this movie was just one long skid mark on a pair of old overused underwear.
Grade: 2/10
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