Emmet (Pratt) is a happy member of the Lego community, constructing buildings and being entirely unremarkable. An accidental discovery opens his eyes to a world beyond his own and a destiny he is not prepared for.Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are the patron saints of lost causes in the movie world, having taken the book Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, which had no characters, and the TV show 21 Jump Street, which had no cachet, and turned them into funny, knowing, hit films that use low expectation as a licence for experimentation. The Lego Movie operates on the same terms. It is by some margin their weirdest movie. It is in many ways their most creative and ambitious, if not always their most focused, but it is definitely their weirdest. Lego is an odd toy. It’s lots of tiny little bits of boring that combine to fit the shape of your imagination. It doesn’t have a story or defined characters. It is by its nature surreal, a toy where pirates mix with spacemen and buildings fly.
Lord and Miller have seized that free-for-all nature for their film, which begins as the story of a generic drone (Chris Pratt) who discovers he’s destined to save the world, then reassembles itself over and over into whatever — Western, sci-fi, seafaring adventure — seems like it might be fun next. If the spoken jokes are uneven, the visual humour is constantly astonishing. Lego has no rules and the directors don’t mean to make any. There is a downside to this level of creative freedom: it easily turns to chaos. The middle of the movie is an avalanche of ideas that seem random at the time, and it becomes rather fidgety, with the suggestion that there’s no real aim to it. Yet there is, with an ending of affectionate, loopy brilliance that ties together everything that’s happened previously in a way that makes sense of the nonsensical. It is mad, but also strangely moving. It’s very hard to believe that a major studio gave a fairly major budget (around $60 million) to a film with the sensibility of a homemade passion project, with only a very loose structure, little mind for logic and absolutely no reverence for its subject.
Well, thank goodness it did, as for all its faults, The Lego Movie is bursting out of its box with enthusiasm and excitement for the possibilities of a little pile of nubby plastic. The makers could have easily Smurfed this, chucking out something bland that would probably still make a chunky profit on the back of brand recognition. Instead they’ve gone for broke, unleashing a film that’s insane, witty, uneven and almost certain to delight anyone who’s ever laid hands on Lego. LEGO Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Out Sign In or Join to save for later Genre: Family and Kids Running Time: 22 minutes What parents need to know Parents Need to Know Top advice and articles What parents and kids saySlighted by Batman’s unwillingness to recognise him as his arch enemy, the Joker (Zach Galifianakis) hatches a plan to make the Dark Knight (Will Arnett) take notice — involving the Lego universe’s greatest villains descending on Gotham to take control of the city once and for all.
Historically, the prevailing wisdom about Batman is this: dark and moody is good, comedic and silly is bad. Just compare and contrast the reputations of The Dark Knight (anarchy and politics) and Batman & Robin (ice skating and Bat-nipples). The truth (as is usually the case) is more complex than that, but it highlights the problem facing The Lego Batman Movie — can this comedic take on the Dark Knight work? Of course, the signs were good — Will Arnett’s tongue-in-cheek take on the character was one of The Lego Movie’s many joys, and his promotion to the lead role here takes away none of his impact. The best Batman film in years. Batman is Gotham’s hero, singular, and that’s the way he likes it. But when Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) succeeds her father as commissioner, she suggests Batman’s history of always foiling the villains’ evil plots, but mostly letting them escape to plot again, perhaps isn’t the ideal state of affairs and proposes a closer working relationship.
Not that it matters; no sooner has she taken office than the Joker (Zach Galifianakis), offended by Batman’s refusal to acknowledge him as his main adversary (“I’m fighting a few different people. I like to fight around”) gathers up his criminal cronies and surrenders. But to Gordon, not Batman. Outraged by this, Batman decides to go rogue — breaking into Arkham Asylum to banish the Joker to the Phantom Zone. It’s a film dense with jokes, the writers riffing successfully on both this sullen and arrogant iteration of Batman and the character’s rich and varied history. The films are referenced (“That time with the parade and the Prince music”), as are the TV series and comics. And all the sources are mined for the film’s stuffed rogues’ gallery — Polka-Dot Man, Gentleman Ghost and the Condiment King among the villains appearing in cameo roles. And then, for the final battle, more are unleashed. A standard complaint about superhero films is there are too many bad guys (Spider-Man 3 overstretched by adding Venom to Sandman and the New Goblin), but here Gremlins, Daleks, The Matrixs Agent Smith, Dracula, Godzilla, Sauron, Lord Voldemort and more are all unleashed without any issue.
Just occasionally more is more, and so it proves here. Whether or not we deserve it is irrelevant — this is the Batman movie we needed right now. But for all the fan service and subtle jokes, this is still ostensibly a film for kids to be taken to (and it’s been two decades since we had a Batman film like that) and, as such, there is a lesson for Batman (and the kids) to learn. Namely, teamwork is good, friends are important, don’t spend your nights sitting alone eating reheated lobster thermidor. This manifests itself in confirmed loner Bruce Wayne absent-mindedly adopting orphan Dick Grayson (Michael Cera) who discovers the Batcave and wants to become his sidekick. And later, to Batman’s dismay, the Bat-team grows further. Only if they work together will they defeat the Joker’s growing army. This point does become laboured as Bats continually refuses to accept it, but there’s so much going on, it’s easy to forgive. This is the third time Batman has featured in a major cinematic release in the past 11 months.