Originally written Feb 17 2014
The Lego Movie. Something I could have only dreamed
of as a lad. But since popular toys are getting blockbuster movies these days,
it’s only a matter of time before Lego jumped on the bandwagon. I was skeptical
at first, because kids movies are generally crap. But the initial reviews were
positive, and the audience consensus seemed to be that The Lego Movie was
fantastic. And then I saw it.
It’s an okay movie, but it’s way over-hyped. It’s
flashy and colorful to the point of occasionally being an eyesore, and the
animation is more spastic than Superjail! on speed. It’s definitely a style
over substance kind of movie. That doesn’t make it terrible, but it’s certainly
not 90something percent on Rotten Tomatoes good. The overall design of the
movie is fantastic. The sets and environments have that awe-inducing feel of
massive Lego landscapes they sometimes have set up at cons. The character design
is excellent as well. The textures and shading are incredibly realistic, and
the attention to detail on the minifigs is impeccable.
The animation is obviously CG at times, but for the
most part the animation team did a great job of recreating the low frame-rate
look of stop motion animation. The only problem is that most scenes constantly
have stuff crap flying around in the background, and it’s usually a distraction
from whatever’s going in on the foreground. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot
of creative stuff going on with the animation. While the action scenes are
painfully frenetic there are a few nifty things here and there, like Lego
vehicles being rapidly reassembled in the midst of a chase scene.
While it was a clever idea to do the movie as if it
were being written in the mind of a 10-year-old, there’s a reason they don’t
let kids write movies. The whole thing is painfully cliche-ridden and full of
unfunny overused jokes. (Why yes, Starbucks does charge a lot for coffee. I’ve
never heard a joke about that before. EVER.) You can’t come up with a lame
script and get away with it by angling it that it’s from the mind of a kid. It
sounds like a good idea in theory, but it’s not fun to actually have to watch.
This isn’t so much a criticism of the movie itself,
but something that really bothered me about the ending: that kid is a total
dillweed. Will Ferrell was right all along. The kid clearly has his own Legos
to mess around with, but instead chooses to mess with his dad’s obviously
expensive model setup. As a purchaser of Legos myself, I can tell you now that
to put something together like Will Ferrell did would cost several thousand
dollars to assemble. Admittedly Will Ferrell was acting a bit OCD about the
whole thing, but that kid should have stuck with his own stuff and left his dad
alone.
Overall, this is just okay. The whole thing is a
visual overload and has a really boring script. There are occasional moments of
fun, and the designs for everything are fantastic, but that doesn’t make up for
the lame majority. It will probably entertain your kids, but that’s about it.
If Charlie Day screaming about spaceships and Will Arnett doing a shopworn
Batman impression sounds like your cup of tea, maybe go check it out.
Otherwise, just watch the trailer on Youtube. That way you can see all the cool
designs and save yourself 100 minutes.
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