The Emoji Movie, Certificate: U, 87 mins, Sony Pictures Animation.
The majority of 2017’s been a very dicey year for animation. Sing was absolutely excellent: Stunningly animated, stirringly plotted, and had universally well-judged performances and fantastic soundtrack choices.
But alas, the real comedic purple-patch of smarts in Moana, Trolls and Zootropolis wasn’t to last.
Despecible Me 3 was yet another noisy test of patience, Cars 3 trod more retread in narrative than any tread generated by those iconic red and black tyres - and I thought the current shameless endorsement of mega-hit Lego conversions (Lego Movie, Lego Batman, and forthcoming Ninjago) couldn’t descend into becoming any more cynical…
However, it seems I’ve been franchising under a pixelated mis‘app’rehension. Deliberately arriving just in time for the summer holidays, is the trudging Emoji Movie. Those horribly addictive squares, faces and symbols of pointless vacuousness that occupy and manipulate our every single second, now it seems occupy and manipulate the multiplexes.
Pixar made what was reportedly one of their in 2015: Inside Out, a Technicolour dreamscape of a little girl’s subconscious scene through the corporate prism of emotion. Personally I found it to be drawn-out and needlessly over-sentimentalised.
At least this - tedious and product-placed to within a data-stream of its digitally collated life though it is - feels lighter in tone.
Although never in its erratic pacing, as we dawdle with Gene (voiced with pep by TJ Miller), a ‘meh’ Emoji who feels he’s lost his identity. Though how he’ll find it in this not-at-all surprisingly unfunny mess which features a knight of the realm (Sir Patrick Stewart), voicing virtual excrement - I’ll luckily never know.
Some performances however are fantastic. It’s completely stolen by the Bridesmaids character who had similar toileting emergencies of her own - Maya Rudolph - as a great villain. Smiler is a face with an unrelentingly eternal grin and a taste for metal instruments like the dentist in Marathon Man. She deletes futile emojis…
The vast range of their assortment, could’ve been pushed far more, with Ice-Cream on every poster; barely getting a line. The voice cast are great, including Christina Aguleria, doing a song too, but none of the young audience laughed!
Rating: * *
No comments:
Post a Comment