There are so many things to like about “The Lego Movie”: a great voice cast, clever dialogue and a handsome blend of stop-motion and CGI animation that feels lovingly retro, while still looking sharp in 21st-century 3-D. But the best thing about this movie, which was produced in full partnership with the Danish toymaker famous for its plastic-brick building system, is its subversive nature. While clearly filled with affection for — and marketing tie-ins to — the titular product that’s front and center, it’s also something of a sharp plastic brick flung in the eye of its corporate sponsor. Once celebrated for fostering creativity through simple yet versatile sets that could be combined into a wide variety of structures — a barn, a boat, a plane — the 80-year old Lego company is probably best known today as a purveyor of narrowly proscribed model kits with hundreds of highly specialized pieces designed to replicate, in meticulous detail, say, the A-wing starfighter from “Star Wars
,” and nothing else. The most essential item of the modern Lego set has become, unfortunately, the instruction booklet. Thankfully, and somewhat surprisingly, “The Lego Movie” takes dead aim at this disturbing trend, undermining, with delightful results, the hegemony of a creative toy that comes with its own set of inflexible rules. “The Lego Movie” is an homage to the spirit of the iconoclast (i.e., the child). Its hero, ironically, is anything but a rule-breaker. Set in a world built entirely of Legos, the story revolves around construction worker Emmet Brickowski (voice of Chris Pratt), a tiny plastic Everyman who loves nothing better than following instructions. But when his Lego universe is threatened by an evil villain (Will Ferrell) who intends to glue all the world’s pieces — and its people — together, Emmet must join forces with a group of rebels to stop him. (In a nod to the term Lego uses to designate its in-house designers, these creative free spirits are known as “master builders.”)
Guided by a leader who’s part Gandalf and part Morpheus (Morgan Freeman), this underground resistance movement consists of a fittingly motley crew: a punk-ish loner named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks); her egotistical boyfriend, Batman (Will Arnett); a well-worn Lego spaceman figure from the mid-1980s (Charlie Day); and a robot-pirate hybrid named Metal Beard (Nick Offerman). The rest of the freedom fighters are a cheeky mix of Lego-sized historical personages (Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare and Shaquille O’Neal) and co-branded comic book heroes (Green Lantern, Superman, Wonder Woman and others). Keep an ear out for cameos by such stars as Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum and Billy Dee Williams, good-naturedly reprising his role as Lando Calrissian from the “Star Wars” trilogy. It’s hard not to have fun when the film (written and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller) is having such a good time with pop culture. The chief party animal, of course, is Ferrell. Overplaying his character, Lord Business, like a distant cousin of his dim-witted “Megamind” villain, the actor once again gets tons of comic mileage out of his patented silly grandiloquence.
(“Nail polish remover” — a deadly weapon if you’re a plastic toy and your face has been painted on — becomes, in Ferrell’s threatening delivery, the “poe-leash remover of nah-eel.”) “The Lego Movie” pokes fun at anyone who would argue that Lego products are, as one character puts it, “a highly sophisticated, interlocking brick system,” and not simply toys. But it also makes fun of itself, tweaking the conventions of narrative filmmaking, animation and Lego model-making itself. It’s a constant pleasure to discover how the animators have figured out how to render such un-bricklike substances as water, soap bubbles, the steam from a locomotive or flames. The moral of this story is a sweet and uncomplicated one: Believe in yourself; there’s a time to follow the rules and a time to break them. Sure, those sentiments are cloying. In fact, they sound like something you’d see on one of those stupid, inspirational cat posters, don’t they? As it turns out, that’s exactly how a character in this adorably acerbic little movie describes them.
★ ★ ★ ½ PG. Contains mild action and some rude, nose-thumbing humor. Feb 6, 2017 at 8:48 pm In 2014, we got one of the strangest but coolest ideas for an animated movie. The most popular brand of toys got a damn movie filled with all sorts of licensed characters like Gandalf. It could've been a disaster that seemed like a lengthy commercial for the toys, but it was a massive hit with both kids and adults! The humor, heart, and original ideas helped make The Lego Movie feel like a legitimate movie and a good one at that. Funnily enough, one character that was just a simple cameo ended up being so popular with fans that Warner Bros. greenlit a solo film for that character. That character was none other than The Dark Knight himself, Batman. The film is about Batman being lonely and choosing to avoid having a family after the events in his childhood that created him. His life should be good as he's rich and famous, but he has no one to share his money and happiness with.
Alfred eventually turns his attention to a young boy (Robin) he adopted and tells Batman to focus on the boy. What transpires is a heartwarming, animated comedy that makes fun of Batman's 75+ years in pop culture. Below you'll find some excerpts from reviews for the film, both good and bad. The movie currently stands at a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes with 34 positive reviews and 1 negative. At the time of writing this, The Lego Batman Movie is the highest rated Batman film with Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight falling in second at 94%. “The Lego Batman Movie” is still roughly four hundred million times more enjoyable than “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice,” and hardcore Bat-fans will probably find it an absolute joy. But those of us who were hoping for the film to be something of an antidote to superhero formula will unfortunately find it adhering much too closely to the playbook." "The first thing to say about “The Lego Batman Movie” is that it’s kicky, bedazzling, and super-fun.
The second thing to say about it is that, like “The Lego Movie” (2014), it’s a kiddie flick that’s been made in a sophisticated spirit of lightning-fast, brain-bursting paradox. The movie uses digital animation to create the illusion that it’s set in a herky-jerky universe of plastic Lego bricks — but it has such a kaleidoscopic, anything-goes flow that it trumps the imagination of just about any animated feature you could name. The characters are Lego minifigures with pegs for heads and crudely etched faces that barely move, yet they have more personality than the majority of human actors. Most delicious of all: “The Lego Batman Movie” comes on like a kid-friendly sendup of the adult world, yet there’s a dizzying depth to its satirical observations that grows right out of the spectacularly fake settings, which are hypnotic to look at but have the effect of putting postmodern quotation marks around…everything." "“The Lego Batman Movie” uses the towering plasticity of Lego to tweak a superhero culture (namely, ours) that pretends to be about nobility but is really about the vain delusion of full-time fantasy.
Your average Pixar comedy thumbs its nose at a great many things, but “The Lego Batman Movie” is a helter-skelter lampoon in the daftly exhilarating spirit of Mad magazine and the “Naked Gun” films. It’s that quick and cutthroat clever and self-knowing. There’s every chance it will soar at the box office, and make no mistake: It deserves to." "“The Lego Batman Movie” gleefully parodies every mass-media iteration of its hero, from the serials to “Super Friends” and from Adam West to Ben Affleck. While hard-core devotees will enjoy an overflowing basket of Easter eggs, you don’t have to be a super-fan to enjoy its crafty mix of outlandish verbal humor and outrageous visuals." "Movie superhero fans tend to be divided into camps, with Marvel people complaining about the dank glumness of the DC films, and DC partisans decrying the jokiness of Marvel movies. Committed to lunacy while paying homage to the varied legacy of Batman over the decades, “The Lego Batman Movie” might be the common ground that satisfies both camps."
"The usually dark world of Batman is reimagined with insane energy and vibrancy. The quality of animation ensures each one of its blocky characters bursts with life and emotion. I particularly love how McKay and his writers have – very much in the spirit of LEGO – mixed-and-matched elements from other Batman stories and adaptations. Danny DeVito’s Penguin colludes with Tom Hardy’s Bane, while Arnett’s Batman quotes Michael Keaton one minute and tips his cowl to Adam West the next. Where else can you see that? It’s a frenetic and joyously unhinged celebration of all things Batman. But it’s so much more than a parody. Beneath its eccentric surface, The LEGO Batman Movie finds a new way to approach these familiar characters. Yes, it’s a great comedy, but it’s a great Batman movie, too." "It was already brave of the custodians of the Batman franchise to let The Lego Movie mock their prize asset so mercilessly in 2014. The fact that they’ve doubled down with this feature-length parody suggests they figure either Batman can take it, or that he’s reached that point in the superhero cycle where it’s no longer possible to take him seriously.