Movie Review - The Lego Movie

The Lego Movie

2014

Warner Bros. Pictures / Village Roadshow Pictures / RatPac Dune Entertainment / The Lego Group / Vertigo Entertainment / Lin Pictures / Warner Bros. Animation

20th Century Fox / Warner Home Video

4.25 / 10

This is an atrociously boringly unfunny and predictable movie, though it's beautifully shot.  All the faults lie with writers and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.

The synopsis of the movie is pretty decent and should have resulted in a good movie.  A regular Lego construction worker, Emmet, finds out that he's the master builder of an ancient prophecy that states he'll save the world from the craggle and Lord Business.

Where the story falls short is the overused and cliched jokes and characters and they were telegraphed so early you knew they were coming.  For example, Emmet has only had one original design idea - a double-decker sofa; so when asked to build something when they are trying to escape from Bad-Cop and his minions, he builds (you guessed it) his double-decker sofa while everybody else builds the submarine; then when the sub is destroyed by Bad-Cop guess what survives... yep, you're right the sofa.  I was groaning and shaking my head.  All too predictable.

Next major fault is the direction, there are lots of scenes that are dragged out too long, in particular, the scene where Bad-Cop / Good-Cop (which was a very inventive idea) is interrogating Emmet.  Bad-Cop gets angry and goes mental and kicks a chair around the room.  It's not that funny a scene and it becomes boring quite quickly as the directors stretch the sequence out and actually diminishes the scene.

Another thing the films suffers with is the vocal talents.  With the exception of Will Arnet as Bruce Wayne / Batman, Elizabeth Banks as Wyldstyle / Lucy, and Nick Offerman as Metal Beard, the rest of the voices just don't quite fit their character.  I am not a big fan of Will Ferrell though I have to admit he's not too bad here as he reigns in some of his outlandishness.  However, he should have been more intimidating, mean, and menacingly voiced for his character of Lord Business.  I felt embarrassed for Morgan Freeman as he sounded tired, for the most part, in his rendition of Vitruvius.  Then there was the grating and annoying tones of Unikitty, played by Amanda Brie, who had me reaching for the remote and the off button.  I did like the way that they incorporated original voices into the cast as C3P0 was voiced by Anthony Daniels and Billy Dee Williams voiced Lando - shame they couldn't do it with the rest of the "Known" cast.

The only good thing this film had going for it was the Lego itself and it's CGI generation.  Had the rest of the film been as good these scenes it would have been a masterpiece of filmmaking.  However special effects cannot carry a film alone.

To be honest I wouldn't recommend this film to anybody.  There are a lot of much better kids films out there... So go treat yourself and watch one of them.  I wouldn't even push this for the Batman element, even though he's one of the main good elements he's still not enough... and he even starts to wear thin as the movie progresses...  I'm now a little worried for The Lego Batman Movie.