It's actually hard to review The Lego Movie without spoiling it, because even though the film is a really fun romp through a fantastical world, for me the truly meaningful stuff happens during the parts of the film that were not at all covered in the trailers.
On its face, after all, the animated film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, really doesn't seem like much more than a 90-plus minute commercial for Lego, especially considering appearances by licensed characters like Batman (played here by Will Arnett), Superman (Channing Tatum), Green Lantern (Jonah Hill) and WonderWoman (Cobie Smulders), but as the narrative unfolds, about a seemingly unremarkable Lego construction worker named Emmett (Chris Pratt) finding himself on a quest to save the world from the evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell), it becomes clear that the movie is pushing more than just the Lego Company's bottom line.
In brief, the aforementioned Lord Business (who also happens to be the President of the Lego City in which most of the action takes place) wants to use an evil artifact known as "Kragle" on all Lego worlds, and only a Lego master builder known as "the special" can stop him, using an artifact known as "the piece of resistance." Emmet, a Lego minifig who is unremarkable in just about every way, is on his way home from work when he stumbles on the "piece of resistance," whereupon, in fairly short order, he finds himself hunted down by Lord Business' chief henchman "bad cop" (Liam Neeson). Fortunately, he also has the help of master builders Wildstyle (Elizabeth Banks), Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), and the aforementioned Batman, among others, though even they may not be enough to stop Lord Business' insidious plans.
The plot seems generic enough, with a "chosen one" on a quest to stop a bad guy from destroying the world, but the journey is more than worth taking thanks to some astonishing visuals using the world's favorite brick toy, some pretty clever humor and a third act twist that may surprise some and may confirm what others were thinking throughout the movie but which, either way, shows that this movie is so much more than a glorified toy advertisement. Directors Lord and Miller, whose previous animated film feature was Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and who even helped write the script for this film, demonstrate rather convincingly that they are the perfect people for this job.
The nice thing about Lego is that it lends itself to animation quite readily as evidenced by the sheer number of amateur stop-motion shorts (and even features) that have been uploaded to the internet over the years, so the question was always finding a story that stood out, which the filmmakers have arguably done quite well. The next step was to marry computer generated imagery with the stop-motion animation for which Lego has become fairly well-known (e.g., the stop-motion version of Monty Python's "spamalot") and the filmmakers pulled this off with aplomb as well. In fact, the result is quite clever; the CGI basically masquerades as stop-motion, and because stop-motion tends to be jerky, the filmmakers get away with using fewer frames per second than they would on a slicker, more "traditional" CGI film. It's fun to note that the filmmakers try to limit the characters' movements to the range of movements possible with Lego minifigures, although they do "cheat" periodically. Particularly hilarious is the sequence in which the lead character Emmet declares that he will start his day with jumping jacks, which turn out to be severely limited in movement.
As incongruous as this may sound for a movie that features several established characters like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, The Lego Movie is actually about creativity, about breaking boundaries and preconceived or stifling notions of creativity. It's hard to go into this in great detail without spoiling a major plot twist but suffice it to say it is a movie that children and adults can appreciate.
4.5/5
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