'Cavemen' should go back to the Stone Age 'Cavemen' should go back to the Stone AgeUnlock This Article for a FriendTo unlock this article for your friends, use any of the social share buttons on our site, or simply copy the link below. Share This Article with a FriendTo share this article with your friends, use any of the social share buttons on our site, or simply copy the link below. In the ArchivesFebruary 2014To continue reading, subscribe now for full print and digital access.Batman (voiced by the great Will Arnett) is back — but this time front and center — in "The Lego Batman Movie."You want me to review "The LEGO Batman Movie"? You really think that readers are going to see the headline, "Movie review: ‘The Lego Batman Movie’ builds on a great brand," and think, "I really wonder what the Daily News thinks of Will Arnett's return as the Caped Crusader. I'm also curious about whether Zach Galifianakis can pull off the challenging role of the emotionally scarred, but sadistically vicious Joker.
And, now that I'm about to click on the review, I do wonder whether the author, who called the original 'LEGO Movie' the 'best film since "Citizen Kane,"' will ultimately be a fair arbiter of the spinoff." I guess what I'm saying is, you don't need a review of "The LEGO Batman Movie." If you saw the original, you know exactly what you're getting: animated bricks, a simple action movie plot, and Arnett's cocky Batman — with so much fourth-wall breaking that people in the front row will likely leave covered in debris. But I'm paid to do this stuff, so here goes: "The LEGO Movie" was indeed a five-star classic: It was innovative, it was irreverent, and its touching plot added a live-action twist at the end that, while cloying, felt real. Robin is not as annoying as one would have expected, given he's played by Michael Cera. "LEGO Batman" pulls heartstrings, but they bend rather than break. In short: We know Batman works alone (mostly in black, but sometimes in gray, Lego pieces), and we know that his inevitable crime-fighting partnership with Robin (Michael Cera), Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) and Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) will end in the long-reviled group hug.
But only the under-10 crowd will be bawling when it happens. It's hard to get emotional about mini-figures. If you remember anything about the original “Lego Movie,” Batman likes to work in black or dark gray. Much more successful is the Lego film franchise itself. This version feels a lot less like a long advertisement for Lego products than the original, which featured multiple "here's how to build something cool" segments. And "LEGO Batman" uses pop culture better than the original. A scene in which Batman must confront his solitary existence employs Three Dog Night's "One (Is the Loneliest Number)" to near perfection. And several references to the late-1960s "Batman" TV series will also please the adults, especially a fight scene in which words like "Pow!" and "Kersplat" appear above the action, seconds after Arnett's Batman said they would. Yes, there's lots of self-references to "The LEGO Batman Movie," but isn't that what you're paying for? And isn't that why you're still reading this review?
Oh, maybe you want one more thing: The movie poster quote. Here goes: "The LEGO Batman Movie" takes the best thing about "The LEGO Movie" — Batman! — and makes him America's new action hero. Take that, Vin Diesel!"Send a Letter to the EditorWhen I think about the house I grew up in — my football-themed bedroom, the big family room, the yard — there are always Lego bricks everywhere. And I’m clearly not alone, because everyone in my packed theater watching The Lego Movie this weekend seemed to have the same experience I did: a 100-minute exercise in nostalgia, rendered in RealD 3D. It's the first big-budget Lego movie in the company's 80-year history, made painstakingly over five years in concert with writer–director duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Its cast list is riddled with A-list actors, its marketing is massive and unavoidable — and it's a shockingly fun, remarkably entertaining movie. Sure, it's an hour and a half of advertising for Lego, but if this is the future of marketing, sign me up.
The movie follows Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt), a normal guy with a normal job and a normal life. As soon as he wakes up, he breaks out the instruction manual. He follows the speed limit, works diligently at his construction job, and every once in a while wonders if there might be more to life than this. One night as he's leaving his worksite he meets a pretty girl named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), and finds a mysterious object called The Piece of Resistance. The one who finds it, it's been prophesied, is The Special: the smartest, most talented, most interesting person in the world, and the one who will save everyone from President Business (Will Ferrell) and his evil plan. But to do that he needs to ditch the instructions and go freestyle. There's only one way to stop lord business It's not exactly breaking new ground — normal guy learns he's special, saves the world — and it does come with a fair amount of heavy-handed preaching about how everyone is special and we can all be anything we want.
Like any good family-friendly movie, there's a love story, there are jokes both obvious and subtle, and there's a surprisingly tender third act. But everything about the way The Lego Movie unfolds feels fresh, with Lord and Miller doing their brand-building duty while simultaneously rolling their eyes at it. Where a movie like The Internship is one long bow at the altar of Google, The Lego Movie frequently cuts to awkward scenes where minifigures can’t quite figure out how to hold hands, or the revered "relics" that are mostly just gross things you might accidentally find in a box full of Lego bricks. It’s loving throughout, but it’s edgy and self-deprecating enough to never feel contrived. Everything in the movie from elaborate cities to puffs of smoke is made of Lego, and it's all fair game: at one point Wyldstyle builds a motorcycle out of an alleyway in order to escape Liam Neeson's nefarious Bad Cop. It's this build-and-rebuild ethos that makes the movie go — the movie twists and turns relentlessly and often without any warning, as if there's a kid above acting like King Kong and knocking down the tower he's built before starting over on something different.
It's a funny, quirky, weird adventure that has fun with the limitations of Legos while making clear that there's nothing you can't do or make with those interlocking blocks. "I think what we’ve really found is that Lego is a medium," Michael McNally, Lego's brand relations director, tells me. "It’s not a toy, it’s a medium for other people to tell their own stories and create their own adventures." To tell theirs, Lord and Miller (who wrote and directed 21 Jump Street and the Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs series) turned to Animal Logic, a well-known Australian effects studio. The result is stunning, a mix of stop-motion and photorealism that left me constantly forgetting and remembering the characters are Lego minifigures with claws for hands and as many personalities as they have outfits. The world of The Lego Movie is enormous and meticulously detailed, and McNally notes that you could pause the movie at any point and build everything you see. (Lego’s own designers helped Animal Logic with the set and character design.)
The film still feels very much like Lord and Miller, though, a constant string of winking references and off-topic pop culture jokes to go with crazy sight gags and physical humor. The cast may be needlessly star-studded — Channing Tatum’s Superman has all of about three lines — but it’s hard to imagine a lesser group pulling off this mix of irreverent and sincere. Will Arnett might be my favorite Batman ever. It's a movie made for Lego fans of all ages, which McNally reminds me are everywhere: Lego is the second-largest toy maker in the world, and there are even communities of Adult Fans of Lego (AFOL) around the world. "It’s no different from Volkswagen owners or Apple enthusiasts or Disney fanatics," he says. "We have Lego fans." He grants that the movie seems designed to encourage and revive interest in Lego (and to sell bricks), but says that wasn't the point. "A feature film was never really something we set out to make. A lot of people say, ‘Well, toy movies are just designed to sell toys.’