One of the main things that keeps me going whenever I’m
covering less-than-ideal features on this blog is the notion that, regardless
of anything else, bad movies tend to give me plenty of material to write about.
No matter how unpleasant a film may be to sit through in the moment, there’s
always the chance for written catharsis afterwards. However, there is such a
thing as giving me too much material. I mean, this is a family film made
to cash in on the success of the LEGO movies, itself based on a counterpart
to the LEGO toy system. I get the feeling that any remarks I have about how
cheap this thing is will only be playing into the obvious, but trust me,
there’s a whole lot else that’s wrong with this thing.
For a start, it can’t even advertise its own product
properly. As far as actually bringing the titular toys to the big screen, all
of the effort(?) is relegated to the character figures; everything else is
painfully generic, with the backgrounds and settings looking like they’d fit
just as well in any other animated kids’ film. Whether it’s the dusty Wild West
town, the fairy-tale castle, or the Roman coliseum, it’s all bland and
near-literal window dressing. And even the figures themselves don’t look right,
starting out on a gag about the lack of opposable joints on the figures that
winds up being completely forgotten right after, since they all look like
standard animated characters.
Oh, this thing is a musical as well. A really bland,
ear-snail kind of musical where all the music is dull, the lyrics even more so,
and the actors singing them don’t do a good job. Admittedly, it starts out on
an okay note with Anya Taylor-Joy’s Marla singing about all the overseas
adventures she wants to have, showing some quite spirited blocking in the
process. But from then on, it’s a bunch of talk-singing through numbers that
seem tailor-made to be ignored outright. And then there’s the appearance of the
fairy godmother, played by Meghan Trainor, whose performance and singing are
skin-crawlingly terrible. She makes me want to Marvin Gaye and get cremated.
In keeping with the apathy put into the visual detail, the
writing and what can charitably be called characterisation is just as
undercooked. There are no visual gags to be found here, which is really the
minimum that a modern animated comedy should be able to do, sticking mainly to
quips from the parade of figures that are as hollow as the plastic they’re
supposed to be made of. The film tries to subvert gender tropes by making Marla
a knight who fights alongside her brother, but not before putting her in Wild
West garb, street clothes and a princess gown. That’s not empowerment, that’s
dress-up, and it only makes her ‘reconnect with my inner child’ schtick even
duller to sit through.
Gabriel Bateman as her brother/child-in-the-body-of-a-Viking-warrior
Charlie doesn’t get a lot to do, Jim Gaffigan as Del makes for particularly
weak comic relief, Adam Lambert as the villain Emperor Maximus is infuriatingly
bland, and Daniel Radcliffe as secret agent Rex Dasher, the character that most
of the marketing was built around? Barely in it, and when he’s around, he just
ends up being depressing because no one else here is having even half as much
fun as he is, the audience included.
And yet, none of that matches up to this film’s biggest sin,
and this is where the main LEGO Movie comparison comes into play. Now, the LEGO
Movies themselves made it quite clear that the content of their stories isn’t
actually real, just a visualisation of the fantastical adventures kids and adults
think up when they’re playing with the toys. Here, the film starts out in
live-action with Marla and Charlie getting sucked into the world of Playmobil
via deus ex lighthouse. Adding once again to this film’s incessantly generic
sheen, it also winds up treating the audience far more like children than the
LEGO movies ever did.
It’s a film supposedly about the power of imagination and
child-like wonder, but it’s built out of the least imaginative story
construction possible, taking little pieces of everything and managing to
deliver all of them poorly. It’s not even feasible as a cheap substitute for
the real thing; there is no realistic situation where
this film would serve as a fitting substitute for anything.
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