- Location: Blue Mouse Theatre
- I didn't think I would ever describe a movie as a cross between Idiocracy and Toy Story, but that's The LEGO Movie in a nutshell. Given that until recently the LEGO franchise was famous exclusively for its plastic blocks and trifling but fun video games, nobody had any reason to expect that this film would attempt biting satire. Apparently, the Pixar notion that cartoons must also contain a sophisticated message is starting to seep through to the other companies. But lest I give the wrong impression, you would never mistake The LEGO Movie for a Pixar product. Sure, it's got the strong social message and novel visuals, but it also has the attention span of a sugar-addled six-year old and comically overt marketing tie-ins. Does this approach represent a potential third-party candidate in the race to dominate American animation?
- Somehow I got this far in the review without mentioning "Everything is Awesome." The film's painfully catchy and intentionally generic title song actually represents everything that is not awesome about the LEGO town of Bricksburg. The problem is that everybody likes exactly the same things, whether those things are $37 cups of coffee, the hit show "Where Are My Pants?", or rooting for the local sports team. And at the center of it all is Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt), the most ordinary citizen of them all. Not only does Emmet possess all of the usual interests, but he even carries around a set of life instructions that bear a humorous resemblance to actual LEGO assembly directions. But despite his pronounced normalcy, Emmet lingers at his construction site a little too long one evening only to catch an intriguing glimpse of a shrouded (yet sexy!) rebel named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks). Pretty soon, he's fallen down a shaft and attached to a magical whatzit called "The Piece of Resistance." Which brings us to the villain of the...piece.
- Striding atop the social pyramid on a set of giant legs is the evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell). Business' plan is to apply a technology known as the KRAGLE (think "Krazy Glue" minus a few letters) to stick together all of the LEGO pieces under the guise of a giant Taco Tuesday celebration. At this point, my review would benefit from not having to write any more sentences like that, so let me just note that the resistance to this fiendish plot involves the aforementioned Wyldstyle, the prophetic Vetruvius (Morgan Freeman), a cybernetically-enhanced pirate (Nick Offerman), Batman (Will Arnett), a cross between a unicorn and a kitty (Alison Brie), and an astronaut (Charlie Day). While this team consists largely of "master builders" who can construct objects without instructions, Vetruvius has predicted the existence of "The Special" who will lead them all to salvation one day. Could Emmet be The Special despite his love of chain restaurants and poorly-conceived invention, the double-decker couch?
- As a goofy take on terrible The Matrix-inspired messianic movies, The LEGO Movie works. Particularly impressive are its diverse, creative sets and several genuinely funny moments involving Liam Neeson's chair-kicking Good-Cop/Bad Cop (one character), the always-brooding Batman, Lord Business in both CGI and live-action forms, or Vetruvius. Seriously, Morgan Freeman needs to lend his sonorous voice to more comedies immediately. Unfortunately, the film's many successes run up against two big problems. One is that a substantial fraction of the social satire comes across as badly sanitized versions of Idiocracy's wonderfully dirty riffs on Starbucks and TV programming. The impression is that of a gentle nibbling of the hand that feeds rather than a full bite. The worse issue, however, is that directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller never have the patience to linger on any of their terrific creations long enough for the audience to appreciate them. There's this great amalgam resistance vehicle that presumably contains some fascinating details, having been designed by both Batman and a unicorn cat, but it all flew across the screen so quickly that essentially nothing registered with me. Some people would say that means I should see the film again, but I guess I would have preferred to see it the first time.
- Because LEGO owns the rights to everything, there are many other recognizable characters including Superman (Channing Tatum), Wonder Woman (Cobie Smulders), Green Lantern (Jonah Hill), C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels), Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), and probably dozens of others.
