Periodically funny, mostly innocent animation which bites off more than it can chew.

Rating: 5/10 (17 April 2018)

"The Lego Movie" plays like a loud Sunday morning cartoon, but which just so happens to have the odd reference to an old movie or life situation an adult might be able to cotton on to thrown in for good measure. It is, like so many of those cartoons, an exhausting assault of colour; noise; movement and energy - experiencing it is, indeed, very much like sitting and watching two (or more) frenetic kids playing with a vast array of Lego paraphernalia - something which, it turns out, isn't too far away from what is actually happening anyway...
Despite this, there is buried within "The Lego Movie" somewhere the message that there is no substitute for creativity and imagination, which is admirable enough, yet rather ironically the film needed to be reigned in much more for it all to work. The story is also incredibly conventional, in its depiction of heroes; villains; mentors and love interests battling away in a place where a plot to end the world has been hatched.
This wasn't something you could say about something like "Toy Story", which decided to eschew some of these tropes; brought to life an alternate universe within our own and also depicted an impressive two-fold character study. Meanwhile, a better example of an animated post-modernist explosion which combined rapid pacing and cultural gentrification might be 2012's "Wreck it Ralph".
American actor Chris Pratt voices Emmett, a lowly construction worker living in a city made entirely out of Lego that is run by President Business (Will Ferrell). Business is a crypto-fascist who controls the population with cheesy pop songs and awful television shows. It is, as Neil Postman once wrote, "...in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate." So slavish to this situation are the inhabitants of Emmett's world that everybody 'greets' the world each morning as one.
Emmett is ripped out of his world of subconscious conformity when, one day after work, he spots an intruder on the construction site and, upon confronting them, accidentally winds up deep underground prior to experiencing an out-of-body experience which renders him unconscious. Before he knows anything, he is eye-deep in a plot to do with Business' private Gestapo and the foiling of a prophecy once made by Business' sworn enemy Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) to do with how, one day, a hero will lead the people to victory over the world of orthodoxy and order.
Narrative is perfunctory for most of the film; that is until, perhaps cleverly, it wraps its story into what is REALLY happening beyond the confines of the film's universe. "The Lego Movie", for the most part, is too preoccupied with dragging you head first through a bush - then through another bush into the Wild West; then through another into a realm of knights and dragons before settling on something else entirely, but not before it has taken you to Cloud Cuckoo Land (don't ask) as Emmett and a collection of allies strive to defeat the bad guy.
How one reacts to any of this will be dependent on one's tolerance threshold for sheer nonsense, but nonsense that is harmless fun and which does possess half a dozen genuine laughs (Vitruvius' secret knock, anyone?), while being helped along by the fact everything is made of Lego. Had it been something else other than Lego, such as 'regular' characters going about a 'regular' adventure, would anyone have really provided the film with much more than a passing grade?
The makers of the film, Christopher Miller & Phil Lord, cover so much ground and flit from one to so many other places that they allow themselves licence to do anything and reference anything from any walk of life or genre. It isn't often you get Shaquille O'Neal joking about how the enemy were "...ready for that(!)" within minutes of Professor Dumbledore arguing with someone over the pronunciation of his name. This is actually fairly lazy, and is best epitomised when they take their characters to the aforementioned Cloud Cuckoo Land, which is, put literally, merely a locale of complete gibberish wherein anything goes.
Rooted at the epicentre of the piece is a stiff, egalitarian message to do with how individualism and diversity must triumph over conformity and a refusal to accept amalgamation and hybridity, which is here depicted as pure evil. Again, how one reacts to the film will depend on your own outlooks in life - are pirates and soldiers best suited to battling one another on desert islands and across vast oceans? Or do they all need to come together with the astronauts; cowboys; spaceships; half the cast of "Harry Potter" and Robin Hood to have one giant adventure for any of it to be enjoyable.
Despite this, the film occasionally branches off for more admirable messages to do with self-confidence and thinking for oneself - using your imagination and being creative, best demonstrated in Vitruvius' line to Emmett that he must "embrace what is special about you." But more tantalising is the fact there are so many objects from OUR world in the villain's possession. And why do we hear a human boy remark "it's your turn to be the hero..." as Emmett has his early out-of-body experience?
By the time the film had ended the first time I saw it (I watched it twice), I had a headache. I was able to appreciate it a little more after the second viewing because I had a better idea of where the chaos was heading, but remain relatively dumb-founded as to why so much praise had been previously heaped on it. Many-a nice thing has been written and said about "The Lego Movie", but it struck me as generally a bit of a mess.