Review of The Emoji Movie (2017) by Wrecking G — 07 Sep 2017

It's here. My first one star review is finally here after all I've been doing for a year and a half is playing nice with what I'm offered and only hating films when I feel like they should be hated (although I really didn't like Sandy Wexler). Beyond its visual presentation and one or two jokes working, The Emoji Movie is bad. Patrick Stewart is cast as a poop emoji, who's probably the only reason you and/or your kids went to watch it and he doesn't even play a part in the story. Another person to add to the "Advertised Extra" trope. There's an uninteresting story about a teenage boy and some girl he likes that is never even focused on. A lack of character development as the three main characters have only just met, yet they're immediately acting like best buddies. The bland villain who may secretly be sadistic gets a generic kids' movie comeuppance in a mid-credits scene despite deserving a bigger punishment than that. Oh and brace yourselves because I'm about to list how the film plagiarises from far superior movies:

Inside Out: Set inside a fictionalized version of something involving humans, actions affect their human, a yellow protagonist, a blue sidekick and an ally who gets stuck in the equivalent of a giant trash pit, curse word joke.

The Lego Movie: Jailbreak = Wyldstyle, a concept that sounds cringy, based off of something more popular amongst kids and an hour long commercial + "Feel This Moment" (of course, since they dragged Christina Aguilera into this) & "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go"...oh wait, that's the Lego Batman Movie, but they're in the same universe so what does it matter?

Wreck-It Ralph: Original characters in real-life apps. Two of them are games. Plot twist regarding female...I'm going to call her a deuteragonist, which I'll keep a secret to avoid accusations of spoiling the movie. Not that it matters with THIS one. Bots = Cybugs, the leader is actually an asshole who wants to get rid of "defective" character. "Defective" character is criticized by their peers for a certain state they're in.

X-Men: Patrick Stewart, characters walking around in a place that makes it look as if time stopped for a moment, character different from others called a freak.

What is The Emoji Movie? The answer: a shameless commercial for emojis, Candy Crush, Just Dance, the YouTube app, Dropbox and Spotify, that would've worked out better had the film come out two years prior since that's when emojis were actually popular, I mean the Spotify sequence has two songs from 2015 in there. Where's the Netflix app, where's the Pokemon Go, where're all those random apps that people like to download from the App Store and Google Play? The Emoji Movie, ladies and gentlemen, a colourful but childish movie with a cliched message and a lack of purpose beyond Sony's desperation to make money since they're not too keen on sharing Spider-Man with Disney.