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All right, maybe not everything.And in a young movie year when the biggest box office hit showcases a deranged man mutilating teen girls for kicks (for shame, Split, for shame), let's cheer an ultra-accessible blockbuster that packs in clever laughs, not to mention fun pows! to please the Batman faithful. Indeed, if any character from the marvelous 2014 hit The Lego Movie warranted a spinoff, it’s Will Arnett’s why-so-serious Caped Crusader. “Really long dramatic production logos.” “Animal Logic animation studio.” Batman himself narrates the opening seconds in his deep growl. He then attributes an earnest lyric from Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” to himself. Oh, yes, this is an irreverent toy story coming to play. Life is pretty damn sweet for Batman these days. The good people of Gotham City like him. They know that as soon as the Bat Signal goes up, he’s going to rescue them from those pesky bad guys. Not even the Joker (Zach Galifianakis) can beat him. Off-hours, Batman takes off the codpiece and transforms back into billionaire bachelor Bruce Wayne.
Wanna know what really transpires inside his lair? The guy microwaves lobster for precisely two minutes and watches Jerry Maguire in his private screening room. But the Joker is nothing if not persistent. So when Batman — his archrival for 78 years! — has the gall to dismiss his antics by exclaiming “Batman and Joker are not a thing,” the villain plots his most intricate hostile takeover plan yet. This time, Batman and his wonderful toys can’t defeat him. He needs to ditch the brooding loner thing and (gasp) seek assistance. Enter a motley crew of eager crime fighters: wide-eyed Boy Wonder Robin (Michael Cera), the new Commissioner Gordon (Rosario Dawson) and trusty butler Alfred (Ralph Fiennes).There’s delicious irony in noting the action and entertainment value here far exceeds that of 2016’s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. (Granted, it’s faint praise. That dud nabbed Razzie nods for a reason. Changing a light bulb in the bat cave is more thrilling.) The fact is, Lego Batman owes a major debt of gratitude to Ben Affleck’s incarnation.
The latter portrayed the iconic superhero as a humorless, tortured soul seemingly impervious to warmth. All that darkness was ripe for the picking. And, holy wow, does this film pick with glee. And the winking jokes come at breakneck pace. For starters, Mr. Grumpy Vigilante is the only superhero not invited to Superman’s rager in the Fortress of Solitude. And his patience with golly-gee Robin — who never realizes that Batman and Bruce Wayne are the same person, despite their similarities — wears thin in hilarious ways. (Shout-out to whoever thought to cast two Arrested Development vets in these roles.) This Batman can also can sing and dance about his greatness (sample lyric in his signature tune: “It’s OK if you stare/I’m a billionaire!”). We laugh because we love. At heart, the film is an homage to the superhero’s deep roots in pop culture. Listen closely for familiar references to everything from a Gotham parade set to Prince music (1989’s Batman) to “the two boats” in the river (2008’s The Dark Knight).
Every single old foe lines up to torment him, including the Riddler, Two-Face, the Penguin and the Wicked Witch of the West. Every single villain appears, period. Like nearly every spinoff and sequel, this doesn’t recapture the magic of the original. A straight superhero tale, even a sublime one, can’t compare with the joyous story of Chris Pratt’s smiling everyman Emmet learning how to save the day. And that movie’s inventive live-action twist just can't be topped. See what happens when the bar is built too high? (The Lego Batman Movie opens Friday, February 10.) get enough of Us? Sign up now for the Us Weekly newsletter packed with the latest celeb news, hot pics and more!: While the movie is filled to the brim with the then-current and a number of previous LEGO lines throughout the history of the company, licensing issues prevented certain themes from showing up, due to the film being made by with Star Wars specifically cited in spite of the brand's history with LEGO (it's owned by Disney, Warner Bros.'s biggest rival).
They lied about Star Wars, to keep one of the biggest gags in the movie a surprise.Batman being silly has never been so seriousRobin (voiced by Michael Cera), left, and Batman (voiced by Will Arnett) in "The Lego Batman Movie." Photo Credit: DC Comics If you asked Batman what he thinks about spending his nights alone in the Bat Cave, eating microwaved lobster thermidor and watching “Jerry Maguire,” what would he say? That he wiles away his hours reflecting on his lonely life as Gotham City’s premier crime-fighter? On his friendless existence? On his family-free future? That he wants to change his life? “You’ve been watching too many Lifetime movies,” he would say, “and drinking chardonnay.” Which is exactly what he says to his faithful butler, Alfred (voice of Ralph Fiennes), in “The Lego Batman Movie,” which opens Friday, Feb. 10, and makes fun of just about everything, including DC Comics, Warner Bros. and Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.”
The big-screen follow-up to the popular “Lego Movie” of 2014, it’s a story as furiously omnidirectional as its jokes — the targets of which also include the hot-blooded-yet-unspoken bromance simmering between Batman (Will Arnett) and a resurgent Joker (Zach Galafianakis), who wants to free all the archvillains from the Phantom Zone (which is, granted, a Superman thing, but let’s not nitpick). Also, why does Robin (Michael Cera) seem to gallivant around in his underwear? “I think Chris, Phil and I probably come from the ‘Airplane!’ school of comedy,” said director Chris McKay, referring to “Lego Batman” producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, with whom he wrote and directed the last “Lego” movie. “You want to throw jokes at people as fast as possible. And if one joke doesn’t work, maybe this next one will.” One joke is for a kid, the next one’s for an adult, the next one is for “a Batman nerd like me,” said McKay. For those parents who regard Legos as a kind of kid version of Ikea with better directions, the whole Lego movie aesthetic will be a baffling revelation — of gags that come out of nowhere, digress from the narrative and refer, mostly, to other movies.
“There are a couple of experimental jokes that only work if you know joke history,” McKay said. “Idiosyncratic jokes that only a student of comedy might understand.” Will Arnett, who has a naturally low register and slides into the Christian Bale-Michael Keaton “gravelly whisper” of Batman without much effort, said at Comic-Con this year that his Caped Crusader isn’t really a parody of any Batman in particular, but that he had the benefit of a lot of Batmen. He also admitted that when his Bat character appeared in “The Lego Movie,” he had no idea it would be spun into its own sequel. “I’m a dumb guy,” Arnett said. “I did not see that coming. So when they told me they were going to make a Lego Batman movie, I said ‘Really?’ But it made him happy. “It’s my favorite thing to do.” The plotline is, by design, a familiar one: Batman is facing a league of supervillains led by the Joker, and a new city police commissioner, Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson), who thinks that having a masked vigilante as Gotham’s leading means of crime prevention is perhaps not the best idea.
All this on top of the lonely life Batman leads, surrounded by no one but Alfred — until he inadvertently adopts a wide-eyed orphan of uncertain sexuality named Dick Grayson, who becomes — of course — Robin, the Boy Wonder. What exactly is the Batman-Robin relationship all about? The insinuations may not be true. But they’re certainly funny. Generally speaking, “The Lego Batman Movie” never stops — not with the jokes, and certainly not with the visuals, flying at the audience’s face. Which is kind of a joke in itself. “It’s a Batman movie, so it’s visually dynamic and cinematic and as big as an experience as we could possibly make it,” said McKay. “We wanted it to feel operatic, so I asked everybody from the production designer Grant Freckelton to the animators to step up our game. It’s an action-themed movie and I wanted it to feel like a Michael Mann or Michael Bay movie, with the action sequences and all. But in the characters, I wanted to observe human behavior very carefully and find the little grace notes that make you feel these people are alive — thinking, feeling, that there’s a lot going on there.