MOVIE REVIEW: THE EMOJI MOVIE (2017)

Nothing says ‘crass and transparent money grab’ quite like making a movie based on a benign product. While using emojis in text messages can be a sort of witty art form, there is no depth to these pictograms. Animated movies are an art form, but you’ll find just as little depth behind this movie that attempts to add backstory to glorified emoticons by way of the secret world that lives inside your cell phone.

Gene (T.J. Miller) is a ‘meh’ emoji, but for some reason, he is not limited to one expression like all the other emojis living inside the phone of a teenage boy named Alex. When selected for use in a text by Alex, Gene can’t hold his expression. This causes the texting app to break down and makes Alex think his phone needs repaired. Labeled as a malfunction that must be deleted, Gene is hunted by various bots, but he receives help from the no longer popular ‘Hi-5’ emoji (James Cordon) and a hacker emoji named Jailbreak (Anna Faris) who devises a plan to escape to the cloud, where Gene can be fixed.

Anthropomorphizing a piece of code may have worked in The Matrix, but Gene is no Neo. Kids may buy into the race-against-time plot, as if there are actual stakes involved, whereas adults will find the whole concept silly. Some of the one-liners and obvious gags land with the briefest of chuckles, but I could not turn my brain off enough to get any lasting enjoyment from this movie.

The best part about it is that it is only 86 minutes long, but that still amounts to an 86-minute commercial for all the hottest apps vying for your attention. Had the filmmakers taken the time to satirize the apps that Gene, Hi-5, and Jailbreak travel through, there would be some intellectual meat to chew on. Instead, the film just makes these apps seem cool and worth wasting your time on. Forgive me for being cynical, but cynicism is warranted.

There have been a few very creative animated films that explore the behind-the-scenes world of ordinary things in recent years (Inside Out, Wreck-It Ralph, the Toy Story franchise), so there could be potential for a story about what goes on inside your phone. The Emoji Movie fails to do so in any meaningful way. Perhaps it’s because people don’t have a deep relationship with emojis. They are short-term, throw-away pictures that are cute but insignificant at best. In fact, the kid in the movie is probably far more attached to the phone itself than the emojis inside it. There’s the story they should have aimed for- an infected phone trying to save itself before being factory reset.

Toys, video game characters, and emotions all mesh well with existential crises. Emojis? Not so much. Maybe they mean more to little kids who have smart phones far too early in life, but a movie about a kid’s phone trying to save itself because one emoji can’t get it’s act together? Man, that’s rough. I have since forgiven my daughter for bringing this movie home from the library to watch as a family, but I will never forgive the filmmakers for this half-baked idea that is an absolute chore to sit through, even if it does give us Sir Patrick Stewart voicing the poop emoji.

FINAL REVIEW: 1 out of 5