The Lego Movie (2014)
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The Lego Movie Movie Review
The Lego Movie is a 2014 animated action comedy film directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller. It’s an important movie being the first Lego flick, but it remains highly overrated in my book.
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“I only work in black and sometimes
very, very dark grey“
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I liked the story quite a bit. The movie’s at its strongest when it’s lampooning all the different plot conventions in major blockbusters and genre films as well as the clichés in dialogue and action, but still it fell prey to all of those by the end which was problematic. The highlight for me was the third act though as the live-action segments were absolutely amazing.
The movie promotes imagination and individualism instead of corporate thinking and I found that wonderful to preach to kids, especially nowadays. It’s a very beautiful movie in its sentiments and also kind of important. And I just wish the rest of the movie was as strong.
Why isn’t it strong? Well, because of the action in short. But let me elaborate. Though the action is well executed, I found this movie frenetic to the point of honestly becoming very exhausting for both the eyes and the brain to follow. It bored me tremendously and I simply found it over-the-top and way too loud and explosive which are all the things I dislike in my blockbusters.
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Chris Pratt did a great job in the role of Emmet who’s such a hilarious character and a scene-stealer. I absolutely loved the jokes surrounding his incapability and the parodying of the chosen one trope was superbly done in this film. Lucy herself is quite forgettable and uninteresting unfortunately.
But Will Arnett’s Batman is absolutely hilarious and there’s a strong reason they made a spin-off movie with him as he’s that amazing of a character leading to that movie being the best in this Lego franchise so far. That line about black being his favorite color cracks me up every single time I hear it.
As for the other characters, they all got minor roles, but I did like the villain quite a bit and I found the various superheroes very well satirized. Morgan Freeman as Vitruvius was absolutely hilarious and a major source of humor for me in this flick. But the movie suffers from having way too many characters and again it becomes bombastic and ridiculously stuffy in that regard too.
There is no denying that The Lego Movie looks awesome. It is the first Lego movie in the franchise, at least the first one which is mainstream and theatrical as apparently there are a lot of Lego movies on demand out there. And they really ingeniously utilized CGI animation into making it look like real bricks.
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The results are stellar and making this movie look really cool, polished and extremely colorful for better and for worse. I still would have preferred the stop-motion technique personally, but still this was well done animation overall. Also, the song Everything is Awesome is of course terrific and so catchy.
I found the world-building also very stellar, but because the movie’s so fast and frenetic, it left a lot of this world unexplored and frankly that disappointed me the most here. The humor itself is very strong and when it hits, it hits hard. But again, in spite of the strong dialogue, humor and storytelling, the excessive action sucked most of the movie’s joy out of me.
The Lego Movie is a very overrated animated flick which has good storytelling, some superb characters, excellent parody humor, very strong dialogue and effective animation throughout, but it simply never got to explore its vast, interesting world owing to extremely excessive action and frantic pacing which made the movie very exhausting and unlikable for me. It’s solid, but it could have been much better.
