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.3:16 PM PST 2/4/2017 Watching The Lego Batman Movie, the follow-up to the wildly entertaining The Lego Movie, is sort of like reassembling the Lego Star Wars Ultimate Collector’s 5,197-piece Millennium Falcon: The achievement just doesn’t convey the sort of triumphant, giddy satisfaction that it did the first time. Maybe it also has something to do with the fact that Will Arnett’s hilariously egotistical Caped Crusader has been promoted from mightily effective scene-stealer to the role of all Batman, all the time — which can prove to be too much of a good thing. Whatever the reasons, although there is still much to enjoy here, this DC Comics-fueled Lego adventure fails to clear the creative bar so energetically raised by co-directors and writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller back in 2014.
Not that it will face any hurdles at the box office, with an all-ages-appropriate PG rating that should give the Warner Bros. release a solid run at the original’s $469 million worldwide haul. With Lord and Miller otherwise occupied (they're currently directing the upcoming, untitled Han Solo Star Wars movie), the spinoff was trusted to Chris McKay, who served as animation director and editor on The Lego Movie, along with a whole bunch of screenwriters. They immediately get down to the business of nailing the requisite tone, with Batman’s gravelly growl first manifesting itself over the opening production logos, offering amusing takes on the importance of starting with a black screen and dramatic musical cues. But the self-satisfied Dark Knight is starting to see that constantly dealing with The Joker (voiced by Zack Galifianakis) and his fellow fiendish rogues offers diminishing compensation for the fact that his solitary life on Wayne Island is getting pretty lonely.
Encouraged by his faithful butler Alfred (Ralph Fiennes), he adopts the orphaned Dick Grayson (Michael Cera), while defending his track record against Gotham City’s new commissioner, Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson), who contends the lone vigilante approach is no longer getting the job done. While on the subject of teamwork, the writers — including novelist Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers (Community) and Jared Stern & John Wittington (the upcoming animated Netflix series Green Eggs and Ham) — find no shortage of satirical targets, taking sly aim at everything from Suicide Squad to Donald Trump’s taxes. But they and director McKay prove less adept at finding that terrific balance between the blissfully inspired and a non-syrupy sweetness that made the first brick-and-knob feature excursion so successful. Instead, there’s an overriding, more-the-merrier philosophy that restlessly ventures beyond the DC universe, resulting in a frenetic pile-on that includes representatives from such Warner Bros. entities as The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter and The Matrix.
Performance-wise, Arnett certainly gives it his disaffected all, as does his fellow voice cast of thousands, which includes Jenny Slate as Harley Quinn, Channing Tatum as Superman, Conan O’Brien as The Riddler, Billy Dee Williams as Two-Face, Mariah Carey as Gotham’s Mayor McCaskill, Doug Benson as Bane and Apple’s Siri providing the calming tones of Batman’s trusty ‘Puter. Australian animation company Animal Logic is again responsible for digitizing those millions of bricks, but this time the effect doesn’t seem to possess the same visual magic as before. Like the rest of The Lego Batman Movie, all the pieces are in place, but they just don’t have that same connective snap. Production companies: Warner Animation Group, RatPac-Dune Entertainment, LEGO System A/S, Lin Pictures/Lord Miller/Vertigo Entertainment Cast: Will Arnett, Zach Galifianakis, Michael Cera, Rosario Dawson, Ralph Fiennes, Jenny Slate, Conan O'Brien, Doug Benson, Billy Dee Williams, Zoe Kravitz, Eddie Izzard, Seth Green, Jemaine Clement, Ellie Kemper, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Adam Devine, Hector Elizondo, Mariah Carey