If you’ve known me for more than ten minutes, then you know that I love show LEGO Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu. I have seen other LEGO shows, but in my opinion, none are as good. Still, I knew how well the Minifigures could be animated, and how good the overall animation could be, and I also knew that there were writers who worked with LEGO that knew how to write a compelling story. So when I heard that they were making The LEGO Movie, I was excited. Then I heard Will Ferrell was in it and became cautiously optimistic. Will Ferrell is one of those actors where I won’t write off a movie just because he’s in it, but like Jack Black, I am not really a fan. Still, he did a good enough job in Elf, and the Hagemans contributed to the story, so how bad could it be? This is The Commerical Movie-I mean The LEGO Movie.
It starts off with Lord Business finding the Kragle and Vitruvius saying that the Prophecy states someone will find the Piece of Resistance and stop Lord Business. Eight and a half years later, and we go through a day in the life of Emmet. After singing an incredibly annoying song, he follows Wyldstyle down a hole and finds the Piece of Resistance. He is immediately captured. Wyldstyle saves him and takes out like fifty of Lord Business’ robots. They escape by going to a different set, I mean realm. Different realm. Totally not a LEGO set that you can buy and build. This movie is not a ninety-minute commercial.
In the Old West, they find Vitruvius, who says they have to go to a different set-realm-so they can train Emmet to become a master builder. Batman comes in and helps them escape. Batman takes them to Cloud Cuckoo Land, where all the other underutilized master builders have gathered. The master builders include Superman, Wonder Woman, Gandalf, Dumbledore, Michelangelo the artist, Michelangelo the mutant turtle, and Lloyd the Green Ninja. Why is there any conflict in this movie? These guys should be able to handily beat Lord Business with little to no issue.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is under attack from Lord Business’ forces. Emmet, Wyldstyle, Batman, and the more annoying master builders escape while everyone else is captured. The master builders work together to make a submarine while Emmet builds a double-decker couch. However, the master builders all want to put their own personal touches on the sub, so it explodes underwater. Everyone survives by climbing into the double-decker couch. The master builders hitch a ride on a pirate ship and sneak into Lord Business’ lair Emmet convinces everyone to follow the instructions by saying that is how they will defeat Lord Business. They do that and get all the way to where the master builders are being held captive. Lord Business bursts in and kills Vitruvius, but not before Vitruvius admits to making up the Prophecy. Everyone gets captured, and Lord Business leaves to go do something evil, but not before throwing the Piece of Resistance out the window. Vitruvius comes back as a ghost and gives Emmet a pep talk. Emmet saves everyone by following the Piece of Resistance out the window and down a black hole.
We cut to a live-action scene (should I really judge this part?) where it’s revealed that the plot is all in some kid’s head. The kid’s father comes down and berates his son for playing with his LEGO sets. The man then gets out Krazy Glue and starts gluing everything into place. Though if he wanted everything to stay in place, shouldn’t he have glued everything down when he was building it and not after? Emmet manages to get the Piece of Resistance and the kid literally throws him back into the plot.
Meanwhile, back in the animated movie, Wyldstyle convinces all the citizens of the different sets, I mean realms, to build whatever they want, without instructions, to mess with Lord Business. Emmet returns and discovers that he now has master builder powers, somehow. I think it’s because he saw an inspirational cat poster. It’s not really explained well, but the movie is almost over. Emmet confronts Lord Business and offers him his hand in friendship. One heartfelt speech later, Lord Business puts the Piece of Resistance on the Kragle. It explodes, and they land in the street. Batman and Wyldstyle break up, so she and Emmet can be a thing. Lord Business has the antidote, and the town is invaded with DUPLO bricks.
Emmet Brickowski, voiced by Chris Pratt, is the plain guy stereotype, a nobody Minifigure from Bricksburg. He follows instructions to a T and blends in so well that no one can even remember his name. The joke is that he’s supposed to look and act like everybody else, yet everybody else has different hair pieces and facial designs, so how is that supposed to work exactly? I never really played with LEGO growing up, so I could be wrong, but from what I’ve seen, in any given set you usually get 2-4 Minifigures, and those Minifigures are all different enough from each other that you can tell them apart. Maybe the early LEGO sets had all the same designs for the Minifigures, but my point is that LEGO goes to great lengths to make sure that you can tell all the current similar looking Minifigures apart from each other, whether it’s cops, Serpentine, or generic bad guy minions.
Lucy/Wyldstyle, voiced by Elizabeth Banks, is the edgy cool girl stereotype. She’s an extremely competent fighter who can take out twenty or so robots with ease, right up until the plot says she can’t. She kept changing her name until she settled on Wyldstyle. I’m not sure why she kept changing her name. They tried to explain it in the movie, but they did not explain it very well. For whatever reason, she was in a “serious committed” relationship with Batman, even though it was super obvious that he was not that into her. She even sort of flirted with Emmet, only stopping when Batman popped up next to them. I admit, the idea of dating Batman would be fun, but practically speaking you should run away as fast as you can. In the end, Batman dumps her in front of everyone so she can date Emmet.
Vitruvius, voiced by Morgan Freeman, is your stereotypical old blind wise man there to offer advice to the heroes and maybe kick some butt. He made up the Prophecy to stop Lord Business and pretends for eight and a half years that the Prophecy is real. It makes sense that they would have their head master builder be based on a real architect and engineer. What doesn’t make sense is that this highly experienced master builder and protector of the Piece of Resistance would go out like a wimp. First, he gets blinded super easily, then when he has his back turned to the bad guy, he gets his head chopped off. I have similar issues with Wyldstyle. Are you a competent fighter or not? Make up your mind movie!
Lord/President Business, voiced by Will Ferrell, is the evil guy who wants to take over the universe stereotype. The kid’s father is also played by Ferrell. To make himself appear taller, he will often wear leg extensions. His tech company controls everything in all the realms, I guess, except for Gotham City since Wayne Tech is a thing. Like a lot of other characters, a good chunk of his dialogue consists of him not swearing in a PG movie. I get not wanting to expose children to that kind of language, but to make it so obvious that these characters want to swear is a bit awkward. When Lord Business isn’t not-swearing, he’s making pun related threats or doing a cliché bad guy thing. But he does have the honor of actually killing someone on screen in a children’s movie. Not a lot of modern PG movies will do that. Even Disney movies tend to do most of their killing off screen.
Batman, voiced by Will Arnett, is the best part of this movie. Every other character is annoying, but Batman is Batman. Most of the jokes I laughed at came from Batman. He is Wyldstyle’s boyfriend, but he is an awful boyfriend, which I guess is par for the course. He realized this in the end (I think) and breaks up with Wyldstyle so she can date Emmet. They had to have Batman be the one to break things off so there were no hard feelings anywhere, but Batman is so self-absorbed that I can’t imagine him catching onto the fact that his so-called girlfriend wants to date another man. Actually, he probably just wanted to date her because she wears black. No other reason. Also, it’s implied that everyone but Lord Business knows his secret identity, somehow. It’s never explained.
So the concept of master builders is that they do not need instructions. They can see individual parts in already built stuff, then they can take those parts and build something else. There are a lot of master builders. Mostly they’re pop culture icons, historical figures, or from other popular LEGO franchises. As such, these master builders are implied to have the same powers as the people and characters they’re based on. However, they are totally worthless. I don’t want to subject you to another Ninjago comparison and point out that Lloyd is the green ninja and he defeated the Overlord and is insanely powerful, and I’m not versed enough in how powerful Gandalf and Dumbledore are, so let’s talk about Superman. Superman, the Man of Steel, the guy who is faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive, the guy who has the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, the guy who is a godlike being who fights for truth, justice, and the American Way, is defeated by bubble gum. It’s not laced with kryptonite or anything. It’s regular old bubble gum. This video explains how stupid that is better than I ever could.
The animation is really good. I will give the movie that much. There is just so much attention to detail. Everything looks like it was built from real LEGO sets, but it wasn’t. It’s all CG, not including what was used in the live-action scenes. There is so much going on in the backgrounds that it can be hard to decide what to focus on in any given scene. And everything was animated to look like it was done in stop motion, but it wasn’t. I’m not a big fan of stop motion to begin with, but I give this movie props. The Minifigures were so realistic. There were cracks and scratches to help sell that they were toys. I may not like this movie, but I admit the animation department brought their A game to this project.
When I first saw this movie, I went with friends who had already seen it. They told me that they thought I would love it. This movie was disappointing. It was very obvious that this was a feature-length commercial. I get that Masters of Spinjitzu is designed to sell the various Ninjago sets. But that show does not scream “buy this.” This movie does. Everything is so obviously a set that it’s distracting. The use of stop motion type animation helps drive home that point. The writing doesn’t help. This extremely punny movie was filled to the brim with clichés. Some of the puns are clever, but just about every cliché and at least half the puns are extremely cringeworthy. That leaves us with maybe three jokes in the whole movie that aren’t based on a pun or cliche. Not a good sign. I don’t blame the Hagemans. They didn’t actually write the screenplay, according to the credits. In fact, I think they’re the ones responsible for the plot making what little sense it does make. And also Lloyd’s cameo. (Granted, he's in the wrong suit, since that outfit was used in 2011-2012 until he became the Golden Ninja, and in 2014 he was in his season 3 outfit. But he's in this movie.) No, I blame Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the directors and lead writers. I also blame the corporate bigwigs at LEGO who said “here are some popular LEGO toy lines, make a movie around them, but leave room for new sets.” And oh boy did they make new sets. Watch this video for more information on that.
It’s not the worst LEGO movie, but it’s also not the best LEGO movie. And no, I have not yet seen The LEGO Movie 2. You can probably guess my rankings on The LEGO Batman Movie and The LEGO Ninjago Movie relative to this movie, but I will review those once I’ve had a chance to recover from this atrocity. My conclusions may shock you.
I’m SJ, and these are my real thoughts on The LEGO Movie.