Looking for movie tickets? Enter your location to see which movie theaters are playing The Lego Batman Movie near you.There is a new Batman movie coming out in theaters this weekend, and it’s easily the best Batman movie yet. It’s also a great sci-fi movie, and a great Western, and a great Matrix remake, and it’s especially a great comedy. But first and foremost, it’s a Lego movie. And it’s the Lego movie. It does everything you want a Lego movie to do. The Lego Movie is two things. First it’s the big screen debut of a staggeringly successful 65-year-old line of Danish construction toys that form the foundation of an empire of play sets, animations, theme parks, and video games. Second, it’s the latest work from directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the collaborators behind Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street, Brooklyn Nine Nine, and the cult classic cartoon series Clone High. Impressively, The Lego Movie is a perfect addition to both the Lego empire and to Lord and Miller’s body of work.
The Lego Group has done an astonishing job creating a brand that thrives on creativity and charm. Miller and Lord have established themselves as two of the funniest storytellers working today, and always on projects that surprise with how funny they are. (At this point we should actually expect it. Somehow it’s still always a surprise.) The Lego Movie is creative, charming, and funnier than you think it will be. The star of the movie is Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt), a Lego construction worker in a Lego town where everything is awesome thanks to the controlling oversight of President Business (Will Ferrell). Emmet is a shockingly ordinary man — generic, even — until an encounter with a mysterious black-clad female martial artist and her wise old black guy mentor teaches him that not only does he have the untapped power to rewrite the world around him, but he is also “the special,” the only one who can save them all from the villain’s nefarious plan to enforce universal conformity.
It is The Matrix. It’s also storytelling at its most formulaic, and it’s by knowing and embracing formulas the movie taps into the first of its several rich veins of humor. The Lego Movie is a riff on the hero’s journey, but one that pokes at it and subverts it at every step. The more pages you’ve read of TV Tropes, the more fun you’re likely to have. Yet no opportunity for a good joke is left unexplored, from slapstick to satire. The movie made me laugh out loud both in moments of sly political commentary and in moments of gleeful absurdity. (The roll-call scene in “The Dog” was a personal highpoint.) The Lego Movie is lavishly generous with laughter. A lot of the humor is visual, and it’s the sort of movie that you’ll re-watch to catch all the background details. That (almost) everything is made of Lego provides the world with not just a distinctive look (and some breathtaking vistas), but a distinctive set of physics. The Lego video games often animate their figures with an un-Lego-like elasticity.
That’s not the case here. These minifigs move like minifigs, with all the limitations you’d expect, even when they’re involved in elaborate fast-paced fight scenes. That makes the movement in the movie as unusual as the design. A lot of humor also comes from cameos. Lego does a lot of licensing work, and that gives this movie an unusual, Who Framed Roger Rabbit-like ability to bring together characters from different franchises. Sadly not everyone could come to the party — this is a Warner Bros. joint, so all but one Disney-owned franchise is excluded. There are no Marvel heroes here. Yet Warner Bros.’ own DC Comics heroes are used to great effect, most notably Batman, voiced by Will Arnett as an arrogant, macho, posturing adolescent bro who wallows in his own darkness. Purists may baulk a little at such — ahem — non-standard presentation, but it feels spiritually true. Will Arnett is now easily my favourite movie Batman, and it’s an unfamiliar experience to go see a movie with DC heroes in it and come out smiling.
(If that remark made you super-mad, this movie’s version of Batman is going to make you super-mad, and you should stay away. I just did you a solid. You’re welcome, super-mad guy.) Somewhere under all the jokes, there’s a moral, a message for kids of all ages. This is Lego, after all, and Lego has a sacred gospel; That’s an idea that goes through some twists and turns as the movie tries to decide just what to do with the idea of “being special” and who gets to call themselves that, and I left the movie not entirely clear what I was meant to believe. On reflection, the film’s thesis seems to be; “no one style of play should exclude any other.” But even that message is overshadowed by another. There is a song that Emmet loves, a song that everyone in the Lego world loves, which will worm itself into your brain and stay there forever. The song tells us that everything is awesome. Everything is cool when you’re part of a team. It’s not a lesson you’re meant to take entirely at face value.
Yet after you’ve seen The Lego Movie, it’s easy to believe that, yes, everything is awesome. The Lego Movie opens February 7 in the U.S.By With the exception of Marvel’s Wolverine, Batman is undoubtedly my favorite superhero: a silent avenger driven by an ironclad code, forced again and again into combat with comics’ best rogues’ gallery. From the campiness of Adam West’s 1966 live-action outing to the R-rated darkness of Grant Morrison’s “Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth,” Batman has cycled through story after story, confronting both his own psychosocial demons and the villains that threaten Gotham City.Given all that history (and particularly after last year’s disastrous “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”), you might think there’s not much more to be done with the character.But “The Lego Batman Movie” proved me wrong.This Batman—last glimpsed as a hilarious, hyper-arrogant supporting character in 2014’s “The Lego Movie”— is voiced by Will Arnett (perhaps best known for his turn as Gob in “Arrested Development”) and has a fondness for bad self-referential music.
Despite doubling down on the zaniness, this incarnation manages to tap into deep elements of the character that live actors have somehow never fully embraced.“The Lego Batman Movie” kicks off where most Batman films typically end: the Caped Crusader facing off against the Joker (Zach Galifianakis), the Riddler, Catwoman, Two-Face, and everyone else. After a brilliant display of Bat-techno-superiority, the Dark Knight triumphs again, sending his nemeses back to the lockup.But he doesn’t have much time to relax: Commissioner Gordon is on the cusp of retirement, and has planned for his daughter Barbara (Rosario Dawson) to succeed him. To Batman’s chagrin, it turns out that Barbara is something of a criminal justice reformer: after cleaning up neighboring city Blüdhaven with a combination of “compassion and statistics,” she’s set her sights on Gotham. “rule of law” is in. And that’s not all: when he accidentally adopts wide-eyed orphan Robin (Michael Cera, in an inspired bit of voice casting) at a gala event, Batman is abruptly forced to be the father he never had himself.
While “The Lego Batman Movie” is certainly an all-ages film, adult fans will probably enjoy it the most. Beneath all the silliness and snark is a thoughtful reflection on the Batman character that fills a gaping hole in his cinematic canon.Batman isn’t an easy superhero to capture in any medium, let alone a computer animation style designed to mimic stop-motion cinematography. Irreducible elements of the character are both freakishly goofy (c’mon guys, he wears a rubber hood with ears and fights a man with a freeze gun) and grimly adult (murdered parents, psychopathic clowns with neurotoxins). I’m personally quite fond of his portrayal in the Arkham video game series, but none of his recent silver-screen outings have adequately balanced all the dynamics in play.As a 2012 article in The Economist put it, “Nolan’s films, as ambitious and intelligent as they may be, aren’t definitive. There’s one element of the Batman mythos that they haven’t cracked, just as Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher lost sight of it during the previous run of Bat-movies.
They haven’t captured the character of Batman himself.”“The Lego Batman Movie,” for all its outrageous slapstick, manages to do so. This film hinges on a blindingly simple insight into the character, a truth that previous stories have somehow overlooked or sidestepped: Batman’s need to inspire fear in his enemies emerges from his own internalized fear of tragedy. For Batman, to care about anyone else is to risk losing them—and in that loss, to experience afresh the nightmare of his own parents’ death. Batman’s desire to assume the cowl doesn’t come from pride or rage, but from an impulse to numb his need to love and be loved by others.An early sequence set in Wayne Manor—Batman, eating and watching TV alone in the midst of spectacular opulence, is particularly poignant. Director Chris McKay allows the scene to linger painfully. It doesn’t look so cool to be Batman, you think. It looks really sad and lonely. And for a long moment, you completely forget you’re watching Lego characters.
The heavy thematic stuff doesn’t stop there. When Batman is sent to the extradimensional “Phantom Zone” prison, a strange entity forces him to relive his darkest moments to see if he’s really “a villain who belongs there.” As it so happens, Batman’s life is a saga of pushing away those who care about him, embracing an “idealism” that differs little from straight-up narcissism, and recklessly pursuing his own missions of vengeance without much regard for collateral damage. It’s a Dante-esque, uncannily sobering sequence that resembles nothing so much as a blocky vision of purgatory.Happily, by the end of the film, Batman has learned a lesson that’s been only murkily expressed in other media: love requires risk, but it’s worth pursuing nevertheless, and keeping love at arm’s length leads only to emptiness and self-consuming destruction. In any context but this, the film’s underlying message (“everyone works better together as a team!”) would feel impossibly twee: given the Batman underpinnings, though, it plays brilliantly.
Thought-provoking as the movie may be, it’s worth mentioning that things aren’t entirely seamless. The third act of “The Lego Batman Movie” sags a bit, particularly in comparison to its predecessor (alas, here there’s no meta-commentary about humans and Legos).And while the climax is clearly a riff on the “giant monster-spawning sky hole in space-time” trope, at times it’s played a little too straight—though it’s pretty funny to see the range of non-Batman villains Warner Brothers pulls in from its other cinematic properties.But these gripes are minor: by and large, “The Lego Batman Movie” fires on all cylinders. In McKay’s capable hands, the film captures not only everything that made Batman such a great part of “The Lego Movie,” but everything that’s made him such an iconic character in the first place.Lay aside any inhibitions you might’ve had about seeing the Dark Knight storm the screen in Lego form. This “Batman” is one of the character’s best outings yet.