We're sorry, you've either entered an invalid address, or followed a broken link. If you find a broken URL on an IMDb page, please report it to us To continue your visit to IMDb, please visit the homepage.On Thursday, New York mag critic Bilge Ebiri praised The Lego Movie as, "the best action flick in years, a hilarious satire, [and] an inquiry into the mind of God." And it isn't over-the-top praise—it accurately reflects the overwhelmingly positive critical response to the computer-animated comedy, released on Friday. The film, which is based on—and pays loving tribute to—Lego toys, was co-written and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the pair who directed the fantastic 21 Jump Street reboot and its upcoming sequel. The Lego Movie takes place mostly in a city in a Lego universe. A construction worker Lego named Emmet Brickowski (voiced by Chris Pratt) must save the Lego realms from imminent destruction and coerced conformity. His comrades are a mysterious female Lego warrior named Wyldstyle;
a "Unikitty," which is a unicorn-animé kitten hybrid; a pirate called Metalbeard; and many more goofy and heroic Lego characters. The simple tale is loaded with gleeful pop-culture references and great voice-acting (everyone is in this movie, by the way, from Morgan Freeman and Jonah Hill to Cobie Smulders and Alison Brie). But what makes The Lego Movie even more accessible for viewers above the age of six is the fact that the film is full of political and social satire. The villain is President/Lord Business (voiced by Will Ferrell), who presides over a totalitarian surveillance state. President Business' regime creates virtually everything in the Lego society—generic pop music, lousy TV comedy, cameras, rigged voting machines, you name it. The dictator/CEO uses extended televised broadcasts to inform his citizens (with a friendly grin on his face) that they'll be executed if they disobey. He controls a secret police led by Bad Cop/Good Cop (Liam Neeson), who is charged with torturing dissidents and rebels.
President Business is the Lego Ceaușescu, if you swap the communism for capitalism. Some of this sounds pretty heavy, but it's all filtered through the soft, giddy lens of a kids' movie. Like all other entries into the "kids' movies that their parents can dig, too!" subgenre of cinema, it's this thinly-disguised maturity that makes the film both fun and winkingly smart. UPDATE, February 8, 2014, 12:39 a.m. EST: I missed this earlier, but on Friday, Fox personalities went after The Lego Movie for its allegedly "anti-business" and anti-capitalist message. One says President Business looks a bit like Mitt Romney. Another starts defending Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life (which is just an act of life imitating parody). This is weird, but not all that different from the Fox reaction to The Muppets and The Lorax. UPDATE 2, February 8, 2014, 4:04 p.m. EST: I asked the Lego Movie directors what they thought of the reaction on Fox Business to their film. Phil Lord got back to me via Twitter:
art deserves many interpretations, even wrong ones Now, check out this trailer for The Lego Movie:Action Girl: Wyldstyle and Princess Uni-kitty at the very end. Adaptation Explanation Extrication: Emmet talking to Lord Business in the finale and convincing him to do a Heel�Face Turn is kept in the Junior Novel and Video Game, but the context for whynote isn't. Interestingly, the video game keeps the Plot Twist from the film, but still . Affectionate Parody: The movie frequently (though not completely) parodies summer blockbuster movies. The fact that Everything's Built with LEGO helps, as even the most spectacular explosions and overloaded action sequences end up becoming sillier as a result. Especially the scene with the real-life kid, which Emmet views as an Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever. Allegory Adventure: The movie notably toys with this trope. The entire plot of the film is presented In-Universe as a metaphor for Finn's playtime in his dad's study, which explains why the ancient "relics" of human artifacts can appear alongside LEGO bricks.
However, Emmet, complete with mental voiceover, is able to consciously move himself in this world, albeit with great difficulty. It's left to the viewer's interpretation whether or not the whole movie took place in Finn's head, or if the world of LEGO is its own universe that Finn and Dad can just manipulate. And the Adventure Continues: "We are fwom the pwanet Duplo, and we are hew to destwoy you!" Arc Words: "See everything" is used repeatedly to refer to the power of the Master Builders to see the potential in the pieces around them. Lord Business's obsession with keeping everything "how it is supposed to be." . "Now it's your turn to be the hero." Finn says that to Emmet during his vision, and Emmet says it to Wyldstyle before his Heroic Sacrifice. The power of the Special is... you're special. Artistic License � Chemistry: The mineral spirits The Man Upstairs uses to un-Kragle the Lego universe at the end would almost certainly remove the paint used to give minifigs their faces and clothing details, in the same way Lord Business uses nail polish remover to remove Bad Cop's "Good" face.
We can safely assume that, being a Lego connoisseur, he was probably careful with the stuff. Ascended Meme: In the "Behind the Bricks" featurette, Vitruvius talks about how great it is that he's voiced by Morgan Freeman, noting the famous joke that "that man could read the phone book and make it sound interesting." He then proceeds to do just that.Vitruvius: Five five five, three four nine two. Just listen to that rich molasses.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.