If you’re like me and someone hands you a bucket of LEGO pieces, you come up with a depressing rectangular chair or an airplane whose wings keep falling off. We’re nothing like those obsessives who create replicas of the Kremlin in their basement, or the Battle of Gettysburg, or the molecular structure of strontium. So it is with Hollywood blockbusters made from toys. Most are put together and come apart with disposable shoddiness, but every once in a while a couple of lunatics will build something ridiculous and lasting. When that happens, it should be honored. My fingers rebel, but type it I must: “The LEGO Movie” is the first great cinematic experience of 2014.Shot with a mixture of CGI and stop-motion animation and using 3-D to invite us into its brightly knubbled world, “The LEGO Movie” is a series of irresistible comic riffs on creativity, and it divides the world into two kinds of people: those who like to snap things together and keep them there and those who prefer to pull it all apart and start from scratch.
The control freaks and the dreamers, in other words, and the movie clearly knows which side it’s on. Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here Writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (working from a story also written by Dan and Kevin Hageman) simultaneously celebrate and subvert the sameness of all those little blocks and the humanoid figures that come with them. Their hero, Emmet Brickowski (voiced by actor Chris Pratt), is as generic as can be, and still he worries about fitting in with the yellow plastic crowd. The urban LEGOLAND in which he works as a construction drone is a lockstep society run by the ruthless Lord Business (Will Ferrell), whose government/corporation owns all the voting machines. The hit TV show in this world is a brain-dead sitcom called “Where’s My Pants?” The song on everyone’s unmoving plastic lips is “Everything Is Awesome,” a chart-ready paean to conformity that scoops out your frontal lobes and takes up permanent residence in your skull.
It all feels a lot like home. “The LEGO Movie” then proceeds to cheerfully rip off “The Matrix” and every other paranoid-fantasy-gobbledygook epic of the last decade. After he stumbles upon the legendary Piece of Resistance, Emmet is mistakenly singled out as “The Special” by members of the LEGO underground led by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) and Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman). The latter is a cut-rate guru who might be mistaken for Gandalf or Dumbledore if both those two weren’t milling around in the background in nearly identical LEGO-guy form.There’s an element of opportunistic genius to this movie: Since LEGO has been releasing licensed character sets from hit films and TV shows for years, the filmmakers can toss just about anyone into the story as long as the lawyers agree. This means that Wyldstyle’s boyfriend can be a testy, blowhard Batman (Will Arnett), that Superman (Channing Tatum) can be hounded by a needy Green Lantern (Jonah Hill), and that Very Special Guests can include William Shakespeare (Jorma Taccone), Abraham Lincoln (Will Forte), and Shaquille O’Neal (Shaquille O’Neal).
As a bonus, Liam Neeson channels both his sensitive art-film side and his kickass blockbuster persona as Lord Business’s chief enforcer, Good Cop/Bad Cop.The keys to the movie’s absurdly high enjoyment factor are its exuberance, timing, wit, and willingness to stoop to its source — or kneel on the carpet looking for lost bricks, as the case may be. Unlike “Battleship,” “G.I. Joe,” and the dreaded “Transformers” series, “The LEGO Movie” is rooted in the wonky hobbyist esthetic of the LEGO system itself, Denmark’s greatest gift to the world. You don’t just play with LEGO, you build stuff with it, as far out as your imagination and patience can stretch.It’s a toy fetishist’s dream, then — a movie made entirely of eensy-weensy plastic bricks. The visuals in “The LEGO Movie” are both insane and generous, and occasionally the film backs into a startlingly pure beauty, such as an ocean sequence made of endless, undulating blue cubes.That’s one of the few times you’re thankful for the 3-D, and, typically, Lord and Miller dispel the mood with a gag involving a double-decker couch.
The duo previously gave us the family-friendly “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” and the rowdy, inventive “21 Jump Street” remake, the latter another franchise extension that had no reason to be any good and, surprisingly, was. Their humor here isn’t potty-mouthed like the Farrelly brothers or Judd Apatow, nor does it come loaded with sardonic pop-culture references like “The Simpsons,” nor does it strain for hipness like every other movie tasked with amusing both children and adults. Instead, it’s manic and smart and respectful of the mysteries of silly, as if Jay Ward of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” had been reborn as a LEGO freak.Some of this may still be too intense for the smallest audiences, and there’s only so much sport a massive, profit-hungry corporation like LEGO or Warner Brothers can make of massive, profit-hungry corporations without being called on it. Yet when “The LEGO Movie” finally shoots through the rabbit hole into a larger reality, the yin/yang of order-vs.-messy creativity gets played out on a different kind of stage.
The film goes majorly meta but movingly so, and we’re made to understand that everything we’ve been watching is provisional, able to be disassembled and reimagined at will. When all is said and done, LEGO is still a toy, and this movie is a sweet, rococo ode to child’s play.Tom Hanks sends White House press corps espresso machine, motivational note Iowa Republican pushing education reform got his degree from Sizzler Professor Steve Austin explains the science behind a Stone Cold Stunner Why are there so many TV shows about time travel right now?My daughter loves movies; you’ve heard me talk about this before, right? One of her favorites was The LEGO Movie. We didn’t see that one at a first-run theater because I thought she wouldn’t enjoy it. But when the second-run place that has full meals, servers, and kid-friendly movies for $2.00 at 4:45 every Monday was showing the LEGO movie, I arranged an event for my moms’ group and we took our kids. Despite the fact that a lot of the humor went sailing right above my then not-quite-three-year-old’s head, she enjoyed the movie and it’s been part of our regular rotation ever since.
One of my and my husband’s favorite characters from The LEGO Movie is, of course, Batman. When I heard about The LEGO Batman Movie, I knew I was going to have to see it.I hemmed and hawed about whether to wait for it to come out on Blu-ray/iTunes/Amazon/etc. instead of forking over the cash to go see it in the theater. I wasn’t worried about the movie being too intense for my five-year-old, but I was worried that she’d be bored and confused; I figured most, if not all, of the humor would be aimed at an older child or at adults. (I love the subversive adult humor in kids’ movies. Before making plans to go, I checked out my trusty friend Common Sense Media for their take. They say that the movie is good for ages seven and up, with parents saying 12 and up and kids saying two and up. CSM states that the movie is full of nonstop action and battles, but that they’re not too big of a deal because there’s no blood or serious injury since the whole world is made of plastic. They also noted that the movie edgier and darker than The LEGO Movie.My child isn’t particularly sensitive when it comes to movies, especially animated ones, so we found ourselves at the movie on opening night.
(Which used to be so much more fun. Midnight showings and large groups of friends. Movie theaters that serve adult beverages. Anyway, we watched the movie and here’s our review.I asked my daughter for her take on the movie as we made our way to the car after the show.Me: “How was the movie?”Me: “What didn’t you like about it?”Kid: “It had scary parts.”Me: “Were there any parts you liked?”Kid: “The first part…When he was fighting crime.”At which point we started singing the theme song for The PowerPuff Girls.My husband “thought it was fine,” but that it took a while to get to the movie’s message. (Yes, it’s a kid’s movie, so it has a moral. He said they could have done more with the message, and that there was a lot of “flash and bang.” He also added—and I agree—that you need to know about Batman’s universe going in. The movie doesn’t address major plot points like where his parents are, why he’s beating people up, or who all the villains are.
I felt like the movie would have been more fun for older kids. I don’t have an older one to experiment with, so I’m not quite sure; I’d say ages nine and up, just because I don’t think younger kids will really understand what’s going on and what the movie’s message is. I felt like the only thing my daughter could really grasp were the fight scenes. And there’s a plot twist at the end where [SPOILER ALERT] we learn that the line between good guys and bad guys isn’t as clear as we’d like to think, which I think was totally confusing for her. I also think that this movie may be better viewed on a smaller screen. (Definitely do not sit up front at the theater.) The animation that makes the LEGO movies look so neat, and the care they take to make scenery and characters move like LEGO bricks —and Batman’s love of black and sometimes very, very dark grey—also made it really hard to see what was going on during fight scenes and battles. Kind of like the end of The LEGO Movie, but it was the whole movie long.
Also, Batman is kind of hard to understand; he talks quickly and in a low, gravelly voice.Final take: It’s not a bad movie. My five-year-old was entertained through the whole thing, even though she was scared. I think it’s better suited to older kids who are more likely to be able to follow the story and understand the age-appropriate humor. (That being said, you’re not likely to warp a younger child by taking them along.) Unlike, Moana, we won’t be seeing The LEGO Batman Movie a second time—or a third, ahem—in the theater. It may not even make it into our permanent collection. But if you’re looking for a fun night out with a movie that has a message you can talk about with your kids, check out The LEGO Batman Movie.(For a more information about this PG-rated film, check out Common Sense Media’s review. There’s also a handy section in the review called “Families Can Talk About…,” which has some tips for discussing some of the movie’s themes and actions with your kids.)