Director: Tony Leondis
Writers: Tony Leondis (Screenplay & Story)
Eric Siegel (Screenplay & Story)
Mike White (Screenplay)
Runtime: 1hr 30 minutes
Plot: A "meh" emoji can make a lot more faces than just "meh", screws his job up by sending out the wrong emoji and has to get a "hacker" emoji to fix him as a just "meh" emoji so he won't get deleted.
I remember the good old days, the days where James Corden was a really good comedian and generally just a nice guy and Patrick Stewart was a dignified and respected actor. That all changed August 5th, 2017. The day myself and my boyfriend saw The Emoji Movie. That day, the sun stopped shining, the birds stopped singing and we saw a lot of good talent abused and misused, an hour and a half of our time slip through our fingers and £21.60 (plus what everyone else paid plus the cost of actually making this movie) get flushed down the toilet. I see nothing good in anything anymore. We can now prove, with the evidence provided that there was a God, there maybe much more but we definitely know there was one. This God(s) took care of us and looked after us and our world until it was taken away from us far too soon at the conceiving of this film. This God is dead, we have nothing to watch over us anymore. We live in a lawless wasteland now.
You might think that as dramatic but...if you do go to see The Emoji Movie y'all are gonna feel the same way, but to save you that trouble, I'm gonna tell you about the film, this...could be a long one because I need to get this out there, I cannot hold anything back when it comes to this...this thing.
This was a waste of talent, James Corden, TJ Miller, Anna Farris, Patrick Stewart, Steven Wright, Maya Rudolph, Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Coolidge, Sofia Vergara, Rachael Ray. All of these people are in this film and honestly...they're all given parts that are perfect for them, except obviously Patrick Stewart as Poop. That's just fucking sad. But everyone else is given a decent role, the best voices for their roles are definitely Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge as mama and papa meh. Everything wrong with these voices in this film is to do with the script, they're not given anything good to work with. And it's a shame, it really is.
James Corden as high five is a dick head. Honestly, such a dick could have easily cut him out of the film and nothing would be missed, could have shaved a good 5 / 10 minutes off the film too. Don't get me wrong like, I love James Corden, he's so funny, he's a good actor, good singer, good guy and fuck, this character is I think supposed to be the comic relief but he's literally just on this ride to get himself put back on the favourite emoji list so he can be popular again and like...that's such a selfish character. I don't know why TJ Miller's "meh" and Anna Farris' "hacker" go and save him from the trash app which...does that even exist? I don't have it on my phone but I dunno, just seems a little convenient to the plot.
Speaking of apps, you know exactly where the funding for this film came from. It's literally up there on the screen and it's disgustingly obvious that this is product placement. It's worse than Asda with all the product placement. Literally. If I had to guess, the one company that definitely paid the most would be Dropbox, the amount of times that gets said is appalling.
The film has a scene in which high five takes meh to the "loser lounge" which is a room in which every unused emoji hangs out, and is a room that high five hangs out in too. Now then, that's either a severe fall from grace or this character is a little too over dramatic. That's beside the point, the emoji's that I remember being in there was an old lady emoji, a cactus, a tree, a...I think it was a fish cake with a colour on it, a graph and the eggplant emoji. I know that this is a kids film, but every single person in the world knows that the eggplant emoji, is not an unpopular emoji. And with this emoji being in a teenage boys phone...ya damn well know he's using that emoji and not for its eggplant-y purpose. Whatever an eggplant-y purpose is.
I almost forgot about the teenage boy in this film, he has a crush on this girl and he can't work out what emoji to send her because Quote: "Emoji's are the most important form of communication ever invented." And yes, that is a line from this movie. Someone took the time to sit there and think of that line, write it down and have it put through all the editing and drafts that came after it and allowed it to be in the film. That's what we're teaching to kids these days. Grim. But as I said, this kid has a crush on this girl and he's got to find the right emoji to send her to make her like him, but he can't seem to do it. He apparently just wants to send one emoji, when he could have sent a few in just one text. Or he could have typed out a message. Or spoken to her. Or written her a note. Or used smoke signals. This kid could have literally done anything and he chose to go with the singular emoji. This kid's an idiot.
Patrick Stewart plays Poop in this film. I said that earlier but...I just have to say it again. And he said about 5 or 6 of the 8 jokes based on toilet humour. I dunno if that's what a poop emoji's job is, I dunno how much Patrick Stewart was paid to do this. I don't know if he even was paid. Maybe there was a meeting where someone hired a private investigator to dig up something on him and they found some dark stuff and they brought him in and said "Yo, Sir Patrick Stewart, it seems like you're a highly regarded actor, do you wanna be in the role of a lifetime?" and he would cautiously say "go on..." and they say "How would you like to play the poop emoji in our upcoming summer blockbuster The Emoji Movie?" and he would rightfully tell them to get bent but probably a lot more profane and they would say "Well, we tried to be nice about it but it seems like we're gonna have to do it the hard way, you see we found this in your past, it would be a terrible shame if it were to get out into the public and damage every single thing you've ever worked for in your entire life." And he had to do the movie. That's the only conceivable way I can see this actually happening.
There's a scene what everybody knows already and that's where the characters play Candy Crush, there's a moment where they can't get the meh emoji out of the game and they have the option to either combine him with a special yellow candy and get him sent to the candy jar or blow him up and they show what it would look like if he blew up. The animation on that few moments of screen time where they show this emoji blowing up and his yellow....I dunno is it insides? Do emoji's have insides? I dunno but whatever it was got blown up and onto high five and the hacker emoji and that's just fucking scary. I'm always down to scare kids because they're gonna need that later in life but don't fucking do it that way.
There are no actual jokes in this film, it's just puns. Puns based on the emojis. I'm sad there was no dick innuendo when it came to the eggplant emoji. I would have so forgiven it a little more just for that. There is nothing actually funny, at all, during this film. Actually no there is there's a moment where high five goes to click his fingers and hits himself in the eye. That was kinda funny. Outside of that..there was nothing.
This also such a rip off of Inside Out and you can see that Sony so desperately wants to be Pixar. They want to be Pixar soooooo badly that there was even a short at the beginning that was better than the actual feature. Granted the short was a Hotel Transylvania short which was honestly so good. And given Adam Sandler's reputation for just being poison and having his short be the highlight of the whole experience is amazing. Well done you Sony. Well done you.
The message in this film is just hammered the fuck in. You should always be yourself. I like you the way you are. There's nothing wrong with you. You're perfect the way you are. You shouldn't change yourself for others. There's a scene where high five is accidentally sent to the trash with the Just Dance app and there are internet trolls in there and they're bullying high five saying nobody's coming to save him and nobody loves him and stuff and when he gets saved he shouts at them "I have friends, I'm not upset, look how not upset I am, I am loved and you're not" and it's like...don't hammer it in more, you've beaten the dead horse to mush, replaced with a second dead horse and are beating it with a dead horse strapped to another dead horse. Stop it. We have had this message so much.
The weirdest thing about this film is how it's so cynical about its audience and...how much it praises its audience. There's a definite thing where someone who wrote this wanted this film to go one way and someone else wanted it to go another way. This was such a mess of a script in terms of direction. I don't know how else to explain it, this script definitely needed someone to look over it and tell the writers they have no fucking direction. It goes out of its way to not be relatable to anyone.
The only person who actually seemed to enjoy this film was this one woman in front of us, like literally the row in front and a seat to the left and she very obviously didn't get out of the house much. I mean, just bless her but she was cackling at nearly every single "joke" in this film, the kid that she came with was looking at her as if to say "mam, what the fuck, calm down and get yourself a life hun". I mean I'm glad she got some enjoyment out of it.
I don't know what the ultimately cringiest scene was in this film but there's an "Emoji Dance" which is horrific. I've done some embarrassing shit in my life which makes me cringe hard to this day but I've never cringed so hard until I saw this dance. I wanted so much to be a tortoise and just shove my head into my shell and never return. I felt every single hair on my body stand up and I felt my soul leave the Earth. I've heard there's a 20-minute dance scene during the credits, I don't know if that's true or not because we just wanted to get the fuck out of there, you couldn't have paid us to sit through more of that. You couldn't pay me to sit through that again. No way sir.
The animation seemed a little lazy too, it was the sort of animation that had to always be moving and not stop to really take a breath. The character design was boring and unoriginal, granted the emoji character design couldn't change all that much because...they're already animated with designs set in place for them but when it came to the human characters, it's just very run of the mill generic. The worlds they visited were boring as hell too and looked like they could have had a creative boost. It just looked boring as fuck man. I just don't know what else I can say about it other than...it also looked a little ugly.
Finally, and this is the most tragic thing. Do you not find it suspicious that Chris Pratt and Anna Farris have split around the time of this film's release? I mean it probably has nothing to do with it but it just seems a little too coincidental. Personally, I think this film ended one of the best marriages in Hollywood.
Honestly, there were two positive things to come out of this film, the credits showing their face after what felt like a good couple years and the scene where they're in the Youtube app and there's a cute video of a kitten. You know the one where someone's tickling this precious baby's tummy and they come away and the kitten holds its arms up and it's one of the most famous and cutest kitten videos. Easily the best thing and an instant stress reliever for this movie.
This film is...not good, all I could do while watching it was just see myself smashing my head on the seat in front of me, I wanted Heath Ledgers Joker to come out, put a pencil in front of me and smash my head onto said pencil. I'm ashamed I spent money on this thing, I'm ashamed I sat through this thing, I'm jsut ashamed of this thing and I'm ashamed of every single person involved in its creation. This film....I have no idea what else to say about it. It's tragically terrible, and I loooooove bad films. I really do, but this one was really pushing it. I knew it was gonna be bad, hell I think everyone did, but we all at least thought it was gonna be bad in the sense it was gonna be just a boring, generic kids movie. Hell, I've read and watched some reviews where people have said they hoped it would be like The Lego Movie where it looked like a cash grab but also turned out to be good and they seem to be the ones who were the most disappointed.
My advice for this movie?
- Don't see it.
- Don't let your kids see it.
- Don't let anyone you know see it.
- If you have to see it as an adult get drunk and forget to see it.
- If you remember to go and see it get extra drunk and hopefully you'll forget you saw it.
- Do. Not. See. It.
That's it, I can't write about this trash anymore, peace out, stay hydrated and go see a better movie.
This is just my opinion and if you disagree then that's great, I'm open to discussion and I'm always interested to hear how you feel about this film. This is also a critique which is considered "Fair Use" under the Copyright Act 1976. If you like this film please go and support its creators by buying tickets to go see it in cinemas / buying the DVD or Bluray when the time comes.
