Because you knew there’d be this slow motion shot.

Deadpool Times Six.

Ryan Reynolds leads six black-ops vigilantes in removing a dictator and installing his democratic brother in the fictional country of Turgistan (resembling Armenia or Persia, one of those places where the food is great but the religion sucks balls). Not exactly a democratic process though, is it? Oh, that’s right – it’s American democracy.

He’s not empowered by any government, just sick of red tape – as his maudlin narration tells us – so he faked his own death, and faked the death of his chosen espionage teammates, and is fixing the world on his own billionaire dime. And he’s got a mouth on him like Deadpool.

Modern unlistenable source music keeps 6 UNDERGROUND hip and kewl like a James Wan movie, with dialogue trying hard to be Tarantino, gunfights and Flying Movie Sparks plagiarizing John Woo, while slick flying-cam direction with cars flipping over 5 times when they crash with Pretty Orange Explosions like they’re carrying jet fuel just screams Michael Bay—wait, it IS Michael Bay directing. I shoulda guessed when my eyeballs had an aneurysm.

The team call themselves by their numbers, each bringing a special set of skills to the farcical hyper-real proceedings.

• One: The Billionaire. Ryan Reynolds plays Deadpool playing Ryan Reynolds as “One,” the tech genius leader of the ragtag team, whose phone can do magic, like make things magnetic and move cranes (for some illustrious deus ex machinae/shyeh royt moments);
• Two: The CIA Spook. Sharpened nose and sensual green eyes, impossibly-beautiful Mélanie Laurent – Female Clint Eastwood from INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS – going Eastwood here in all the Man ways, like stepping from a getaway car with two guns blazing, while she’s being operated on in the back seat for a gut wound!;
• Three: The Hitman. Oh yes! The cool Mexican bandito from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN 2016, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, old fashioned guns and a love for my luscious Melanie. Then again, when confronted with that feral beauty, how does anyone keep their hands, eyes and crotches off her?!
• Four: The Skywalker. Ben Hardy (Angel from X-MEN: APOCALYPSE), the free runner, who wouldn’t have any utility in any real world situation, but inserted here for the kewl kids who skateboard, Parkour, and YouTube themselves breaking their spines;
• Five: The Doctor. Adria Arjona was just in TRIPLE FRONTIER (Mar 2019), another black-ops-driven film starring a bearded superhero (Affleck); not adding much here except Puerto Rican ass in tight skirt.
• Six: The Driver. Ayyy, what’s Little Franco doing here miscast as Ansel Elgort? He drives, he drives, he dies. Whaaaaat?!
• Seven: The Sniper. STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON Corey Hawkins joins the team after Dave Franco takes a girder to the clavicle, as a military sniper named Blaine. He rounds out the six and shakes up the protocol, bringing One closer to that redemption that all Hollywood movies must have, in order to conform to Gutless MPAA code.

6 UNDERGROUND is dying for a sequel. One reveals they have nine missions, this first one is to oust despot Rovach (played with ferocious Middle-Eastern oiliness by Lior Raz) and install Murat (Payman Maadi). We know movie takes place during the shitstain reign of un-american traitor dumbo donald because One quips, “Our president can’t even spell Turgistan!”

It’s eye candy cinematography, brutal stunts, creative car destruction, with some throat-grabbing GoPro free-running scenes across a skyscraper under construction… but all the shooting and running and quipping gets tiring very quickly. You can sustain it in a DEADPOOL movie, where Ryan is the only motormouth, but it’s harder to make it sound convincing when six people all display the same sense of timing and gallows comedy. Also, in diametric opposition to the gagging (“I’m gonna kill him!” “I’m gonna let ya!”) we can do without the introspective narration.

Because in a Michael Bay movie, you’ll believe a car can fly.

For everything excellent – like the visual of a girder slicing across the side of a car as it chases – Bay and writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese add a stupidity, like telling one of your team how to arm explosives only when you’re planting them, “Arm them – click to the right” – so they didn’t discuss this any time they went through the plan? Movie can be funny. Really funny. And yet, stupid. Really stupid.

It’s R-rated, so we get casual swearing – yet everyone has sex with their bra and panties on. WHY IS THE MPAA SO GUTLESS? The revolution itself is frankly cringeworthy and embarrassing, as the team throw the dictator out of a chopper and let the villagers beat him to death – just a vicarious fantasy on what we all wish on the white supremacist rapist kidnapper money-launderer dumbo donald.

The redemption ruins the fortitude and ethos of the main character. The concept of his team was that they were expendable professionals who would work for him (I’m sure for a pretty paycheck) anonymously, with no agencies able to track them, because they were ghosts; also ensuring that if they did not know one another, they all had plausible deniability on the identities of each other, should they be captured. When they joined, he gave them all The Speech – they know The Rules. Yet in humanizing them, the movie goes against the very tenets that brought them together.

Movie starts with Deadpool “hating the word family” – and through the mutinies of his soldiers (refusing to leave a man behind, revealing their names against his wishes, having inter-team affairs, etc.) gradually coming to realize that FAMILY GOOD. Someone actually says, “You got a soul man, you should let it out!” And that’s when I kicked over my Netflix account.

END

The best movie ever made about the worst movie ever made.

And one man’s worst performance becomes another man’s best performance.

Adept actor James Franco plays inept actor Tommy Wiseau in THE DISASTER ARTIST, a good film about the making of the bad film THE ROOM.

• In 2003, atrocious writer-director-actor Tommy Wiseau released THE ROOM, a poorly-written, artlessly-directed, badly-acted piece of crap, which nonetheless attained cult status due to Wiseau financing its continual advertising and screenings.
• In 2013, one of the stars of THE ROOM, Greg Sestero, wrote a book (co-author Tom Bissell) based on making that film: The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made.
• In 2017, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber write a screenplay based on that book, and James Franco directs and stars in THE DISASTER ARTIST.

Franco casts himself as the ambiguously-foreign Tommy, diving deep into Method with jet-raven waterfall locks, prosthetics to create a lazy eye, a ripped body, and an accent that Tommy claims is from New Orleans (if by New Orleans he means Lithuania). Reportedly, Franco stayed in character while he was directing, which was a big laugh to his longtime acquaintances who were also cast-mates. (Franco brings Tommy Wiseau along to junkets on talk shows, and I find it hilarious how he only talks to Wiseau in the Wiseau accent, as if it’s a language.)

THE DISASTER ARTIST is told from the point of view of Greg Sestero (played by James’s brother, Dave Franco), Tommy’s best friend (who Tommy cast in THE ROOM as, uh, his best friend). We follow Tommy and Greg from their first meeting at an acting class in San Francisco, through their tribulations in Hollywood (where they move into Tommy’s Los Angeles apartment – just one of many around the world that he can mysteriously afford), to the set of Tommy’s self-financed film after finding no success in the movie business. It is on this last leg that their friendship will be tested, and I find it a decidedly cynical “Hollywood” denouement that they remain friends to this day in real life only due to the success of THE ROOM, however undeserved and unwitting that was.

Franco has gone Daniel Day Lewis in his portrayal of Tommy, from Tommy’s military-styled jackets, to his pocketed dockers held up by numerous belts, to Tommy’s lazy delivery and stunted vernacular, down to his ingratiating little chortle and his inability to throw a football! It’s the role of a lifetime for this talented actor, and the mimicry provides most of the comedy. Brother Dave, up to this point, hesitant to act with James due to trying to forge his own career, is eminently relatable as the bad actor who hooks up with a force of nature that shepherds him into the biz.

Seth Rogen is Sandy the script supervisor, Paul Scheer is Raphael the DP, Zac Efron plays the character Chris-R (notably the best actor in THE ROOM, with Efron probably the best actor of this bunch as well, in this five-minute cameo). June Diane Raphael plays Robin (the hottest chick in THE ROOM and the same here), while Ari Graynor plays Lisa (Tommy’s girlfriend in THE ROOM); Josh Hutcherson plays that floppy-haired weirdo Denny, and Jacki Weaver delivers Lisa’s mother’s lines with that suitable deadness, especially when talk turns to breast cancer. Which she definitely has.

The first half of THE DISASTER ARTIST is played for comedy. No one can quite figure what is up with this Tommy guy; as in real life, this movie does not reveal the mysteries behind his age, ethnicity or financial background; he obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing as a filmmaker (shooting in 35mm and digital simultaneously), but his checks get cashed and that’s all that matters (a bank teller tells Sandy that Tommy’s account is “a bottomless pit” – but I doubt any teller would be that unethical).

In the latter half, the movie loses its breezy tone. Whilst filming THE ROOM, Tommy succumbs to megalomania, blindly leading the more experienced cast and crew while ironically claiming he has a vision, cussing them out regularly, and obsessing over details that would prove inconsequential in the final product. We lose our sense of wanting Tommy to succeed despite his shortcomings. At many points, we wish he could be taught a lesson on how bad THE ROOM really is. Unfortunately, real life has superseded art, and through Tommy’s insistent paid screenings, THE ROOM has attained cult status, and made back its budget many times over, playing at midnight screenings around the world. And the fact THE DISASTER ARTIST exists has made any life lesson for Tommy moot. The time for THE ROOM to sink into the overflowing hellpit of failed Los Angeles projects has long past, and its infamy guarantees that Tommy will never realize what a tool he truly is.

In making a movie about THE ROOM, Franco and Co. actually shoot some scenes from THE ROOM (as filler for when the gang is watching the movie in the theater in the finale). And these scenes are uncannily recreated, terribly-produced and terribly-acted ROOM scenes; so much good work to reproduce so much bad work. It gets so meta that we expect to see ourselves onscreen, looking at ourselves onscreen, looking at ourselves onscreen…

One theme that James Franco makes apparent in DISASTER ARTIST is a theme Tommy Wiseau failed to purvey effectively in THE ROOM: betrayal. Franco as Tommy finds betrayal in everyone around him – from acting coaches who suggest he should be a Frankenstein-like villain, to Hollywood casting agents who laugh at his accent; from producers that he tries to cajole in restaurants (Judd Apatow cameo) to his own cast and crew. Tommy finds betrayal in the fact Greg moves in with his girlfriend (Alison Brie), as opposed to staying his roomie; betrayal in Greg stretching to other projects; betrayal in Greg calling him out on his age, ethnicity and financial background. Thus, from this film, we can now more fully sense that betrayal theme built into the original film this movie is about – of course, we say: in THE ROOM, Tommy’s girlfriend and best friend both BETRAY him by having an affair! We were too busy laughing and being slack-jawed in shock before.

There is a tragic background tale to Greg appearing with a beard in the first part of THE ROOM, and then clean-shaven for the conclusion. Tommy had the notion that Greg should shave in the second half of the movie due to being a best man at an upcoming wedding. And in real life, Greg was asked NOT to shave for a walk-on lumberjack role he scored by making a lucky contact with Bryan Cranston (playing himself) at a café. Greg asked Tommy for a day off to do the Cranston shoot. And this is where Franco’s Tommy attains his nadir of darkness, selfishness and con-man. Not only did Tommy veto Greg’s time off, he forced him to shave, almost like he was removing any chance for Greg to sneak off in the near future to do the Cranston gig, implying that a one-off gig with Cranston would lead nowhere, while Greg’s starring role in Tommy’s excellent film would rocket his career. And citing betrayal just to twist the knife. Greg, disconsolate for possibly destroying his career by blowing off Cranston, stays. And shaves. Whether he made the right choice or not is pure conjecture. It is at this nadir for Greg that Dave Franco’s performance, ironically, achieves its zenith. (It’s also ironic that Tommy would cite Greg as the betrayer when Tommy is actually the one betraying Greg from moving up.)

The only aspect I disagree with in THE DISASTER ARTIST is the way Franco portrays Tommy as a “dreamer struggling to make it.” That’s a fine point of view if you are a talented artist who is not recognized, and the frustration of your predicament causes you to go all-out with some grand scheme that is do-or-die. Now – take that whole previous sentence, apply it to Tommy Wiseau, and remove the words “talented artist.”

Even the talking heads that open the film (including Ike Barinholtz, Kevin Smith, Keegan-Michael Key, J.J. Abrams and Kristin Bell) promote the wrong message: that Tommy’s struggles as a downtrodden artist paid off. “…the sheer ambition…” “A combination of fearlessness and confusing self-belief…” They’re not saying, “It’s a shit movie – with an amazing turn of fate due to insidious marketing,” no, the content of their enthusiastic tributes leans toward the film being a passion project of great quality. And that is the wrong message in a world where people cannot discern facts from fake, where as many people support lack of quality as support craftsmanship and hard work; it’s the Howard Stern defense: ‘if it makes money, it’s gotta be good.’ So the very existence of this film, THE DISASTER ARTIST, muddies the waters about the actual level of quality of THE ROOM. That is, zero.

Let’s get that straight: there is NO QUALITY in THE ROOM. Zero quality, zero talent, zero craft, zero production value, zero understanding of filmmaking dialect. Yet it retains some kind of “worth,” for it is, in fact, maximum entertainment, due to that rubbernecker’s glee of trying to see a dismembered head in the street while driving past a horrific crash. And there is zero curiosity from Tommy Wiseau to educate himself in the craft. Meaning that over the past 14 years of THE ROOM’s existence, Tommy Wiseau has not created anything of quality to dispel the notion that he still doesn’t know what the fuck he is doing. He just keeps eating out on THE ROOM…

Yes, Tommy had ambition and a dream that wouldn’t die, and the balls to make something of his own, and all that stuff they keep telling us artists to cling to – but there’s one difference between Tommy and the majority of struggling artists with dreams to conquer the world, who take up residence in a Hollywood apartment that smells of pee – MONEY. However mysterious its source, Tommy had money to market his product. And when you market anything with enough verve, you get results. Look at the Snuggie, look at the Salad Shooter, look at the STAR WARS Prequels, hell, look at the dimwit, racist 45th president of the United States!

What also creeps through is the notion that due to THE ROOM’s inadvertent success, Tommy is a success as an artist. The fact that Tommy can accompany Franco on THE DISASTER ARTIST junkets and claim fame, however vicarious, seems to bolster that notion. But it is just a case of money – and money doesn’t make something of no quality attain inherent quality. Look at the Snuggie, look at the Salad Shooter, look at the STAR WARS Prequels, hell, look at the dimwit, racist 45th president of the United States!

So I’m not sure what the aim of THE DISASTER ARTIST is. In one respect, James Franco has crafted a reasonable comedy about a comedic figure in filmic history. In another sense, he is paying tribute to someone who simply had the money to continue the advertising push of something that should have died a grisly death in the crib. This is not a movie about a film deserving of tribute, like THE GODFATHER, UNFORGIVEN, or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.

This is about the making of THE ROOM. Which is definitely not a film deserving of accolades. It is naaaht.

END

Zac, Leonardo DiCaprio called. He wants to body-shave your torso.

Flab versus Ab.

A young married couple with a newborn are faced with a rowdy college fraternity moving in next door. And all rock hard abs break loose… well, not really, but once Zac Efron takes his shirt off, there’s really nothing left in the universe to look at.

The suburban comedy NEIGHBORS finds Mac (chub Seth Rogen), improbably married to Kelly (smokin’ Rose Byrne), parents of the cutest little baby (Elise and Zoey Vargas); in their 30s, they still feel cool enough to hang with the younger set. That theory is put to the test when college frat Delta Psi, headed by Teddy (Efron) and Pete (Dave Franco), move in next door and start causing party, noise, vandalism, and unassailable abs.

Mac and Kelly try to take it in stride, try to bond with Teddy’s crowd by bearing gifts of weed, try to walk the cool walk and talk the cool talk, but end up alienating Delta Psi because, well, old. Responsibilities, jobs, tiredness, no abs.

His blue eyes shimmering at their first meeting, Teddy very courteously asks Mac and Kelly to call him first if there’s too much noise and not to call the cops. Mac, not able to contact Teddy during the loud frat party – promptly calls the cops (Hannibal Buress). Teddy feels betrayed, and events escalate between the frustrated couple and Delta Psi, until it culminates in a gigantic party (as movies of this ilk so often do) that will decide the fate of Mac and Kelly’s marriage, Delta Psi’s future and Zac Efron’s glittering abs.

Someone tell Efron to put his shirt back on or we’ll never get this scene done!

In no way related to the dark Belushi-Aykroyd 1981 film of the same name, NEIGHBORS is not seeking to arc any damaged souls or raise any political issues, or even find true love amongst war-torn adversity. It just wants to blow up shit, get drunk and vomit on your lawn, sculpt some dildoes, have stoned party-sex, and show off Zac Efron’s abs. (I mean, really! He’s 27. How old was he when he started working out to get a body shaped like – as Seth Rogen observes – “a giant arrow pointing to your penis”?)

Ike Barinholtz in another great supporting role as Mac’s bud, who helps with the plots to bring down Delta Psi. His most hilarious one-liner (“Rape!”) just has to be heard in context to be appreciated. Carla Gallo is Ike’s wife, taken in by the hugeness of the Delta Psi penises. Rose Byrne is allowed to use her native Australian accent which allows us to touch ourselves downunda. Christopher Mintz-Plasse is a frat boy, and Craig Roberts is Assjuice. Halston Sage is Teddy’s dripping wet dream of a girlfriend, and Lisa Kudrow is the college principal. In flashbacks, it’s amusing to see two great comedy teams as Delta Psi pioneers – creating the concept for toga parties is The Lonely Island aka Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccome and Akiva Schaffer, and inventing beer pong are the WORKAHOLICS Adam Devine, Blake Anderson, Anders Holm and Kyle Newacheck.

Newbie writers Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien keep the oppositionist plot snappy and director Nicholas Stoller (GET HIM TO THE GREEK) keeps our attention by showing us abs.

END

The closer you look, the less you’ll care…

Magician J. Daniel Atlas has a slogan: “The closer you look – the less you’ll see.” Uh, no, I’m actually seeing right into your cliché-riddled screenplay, and your swooping camera moves to misdirect me means that you know that I know what you don’t want me to know…

Four smug magicians use their talents to pull heists and give the money to the less fortunate, like modern day Robin Hoods. They’re young, sexy and dangerous. And too smug for their own sleight of hand.

With slick, kinetic direction (by Louis Leterrier), wasted on conceited characters that are aching for a bitchslap, the magician heist dramedy NOW YOU SEE ME is alternately very entertaining and very irritating. As with any heist movie, much of the heist action is kept from our prying eyes until it can be told in flashback as a “cheat” rather than a smart reveal, like sucking on the teat of the OCEAN’S movies.

Jesse Eisenberg is illusionist Atlas (now exploiting that ice-cool mercenary he found with his Zuckerberg), leading a quartet of magicians brought together by a mysterious magic guru called The Eye, who is the mythic leader of the cult of the same name. Woody Harrelson is mentalist (aka “mind reader”) Merritt McKinney, Isla Fisher is escapist Henley Reeves, and Dave Franco is small-time hustler Jack Wilder. All four desire admittance into that exclusive magic club The Eye, and are willing to follow any enigmatic directives to gain it. You know the beats: they’re all slipped a card to be at a certain place at a certain time, where more mysterious directives are placed before them, which they will blindly follow because apparently, and ironically, they’re gullible idiots.

Atlas finds his card just before sex with a groupie. As he kicks her out, promising to call, she wails, “You don’t have my number.” His reply, “I’m magic. I’ll find you.” He doesn’t say, “I’m a magician” or “I’m magical.” He says “magic.” As a noun. That’s so funny!

Each of the four have some damaged past, and only in uniting – begrudgingly at first – do they find overwhelming success, as a Vegas act called The Four Horsemen. Michael Caine is Arthur Tressler, who funds the Horsemen, and is taken for a horsey ride when the magicians turn on him for owning an insurance company that doesn’t pay its claims. (One would think he’d know better after warning us of The Turn in THE PRESTIGE). And Morgan Freeman, smugly smirking in the middle background as former magician Thaddeus Bradley, is a James Randi-type skeptic who cannot quite figure the Horsemen, except that he’s having a smirking good time watching them make asshats of everyone trying to catch them. You’d think that two of Batman’s pals would know better.

Ruffled Mark Ruffalo is the lead detective tailing the Horsemen, with the boy-model name of Dylan Rhodes, with a smokin’ hot Interpol detective in tow – Mélanie Laurent (Shoshanna from INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS) – who is only here for eye candy, exposition and forced romantic resolution. For coolness, Michael Kelly (Frank Underwood’s “Al Neary” in HOUSE OF CARDS) is Dylan’s partner.

Shades of THE ILLUSIONIST and THE PRESTIGE and any Michael Bay movie where the tracking cameras hijack the action. At first, we are intrigued by The Pledge (the premise of what is going to transpire in the realm of misdirection), and we are always taken aback at The Turn, but our interest soon wanes when The Prestige of each act reveals results too impossible to achieve without REAL magic, the insufferable Harry Potter kind. During one show, Henley swooshes open a big scarf, and we realize – it is CGI, as it swooshes around against the laws of physics. Why? I doubt the professional scarf-twirler was out of your budget as a practical effect. You people are just hooked on bullshit for the sake of it.

Ironically, in cheating their own audience, writers Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt spoil the illusion of the movie itself. For example, to heist an armored car, we are told the magicians are already inside it. Well… how’d they get there? Is it that easy to build a fake floor in an armored van? To heist a vault in faraway Paris, we are told there is an exact replica of the Paris vault under the stage. Well… who built this? Are the Horsemen master contractors as well? (By the way, the French bank director whom they heist – Jose Garcia – is the French Robert Downey Jr.)

How is Wilder playing with a deck of cards in the interrogation room? (You mean they removed all his personal belongings when they arrested him, and let him keep a deck of cards?) How did Atlas have his phone on him in the interrogation room, to be able to switch with the boy-band-named Dylan Rhodes? (Again, they frisked him and said, “Okay, you can keep the phone”?) And Rhodes only realizes his phone has been switched days after the fact, and only because the phone screen glitches. But anyone would know in an INSTANT if their phone was switched, the moment they tried to use it. Do I even need to explain why? A dummy phone contains none of your personalization or history. Later, we discover a logical reason why the detective didn’t realize his phone had been switched, but then we look back at the moment he “realized” and it becomes even more of a pointless plot point.

Like its subject matter, NOW YOU SEE ME is fast-paced because it needs to be, to misdirect, and make us think it’s doing something interesting while really doing something sneaky. Only for the gullible.

END

Will knock your block off!

THE LEGO MOVIE is a maximus overload of cinematic revelry; a riotous brick house of bedazzlement. Action, spectacle, romance, cultural refs, fueled by goodness and badness and cuteness. And millions and millions of Lego bricks.

Emmett Brickowski (voice of Chris Pratt) is a little Lego man, with perfect Lego hair, living in a perfect Lego town called Bricksburg. And everything is awesome. Until evil Lord Business tries to “release the Kragle!” and glue everything in place. And Emmett, who is nobody special – always following the crowd and the Instruction Booklet – finds he is, in fact, “The Special” who can stop Lord Business with “The Piece of Resistance.”

Plot is almost secondary to the wondrous animation, yet it’s not exactly style over substance, because the characters and their interactions are fleshed out well beyond their plastic, and nothing short of the Lego world is at stake. Folded into this “drama” is the Lego world’s interaction with the outside world (our human world) and a touching subplot of a father’s belief, trust and love of his son. Ultimately, the real-world father-son redemption will save the Lego world. The most amazing part is how this jam-packed save-the-world love-story fish-out-of-water comedy-action-adventure clacks together so neatly!

Poffy Duplo

In the Lego world, Will Ferrell voices President Business aka Lord Business (his character a biting commentary on what politicians really are – two-faced, but with both faces ultimately serving their own interests). Lord Business unleashes Bad Cop (Liam Neeson – who has a swivel head that turns into Good Cop intermittently, to no avail) to pursue Emmett and retrieve the “piece of resistance” which is accidentally stuck on his back. Emmett is helped by sexy soldier of fortune Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), who is one of many “master builders” who can McGuyver their way out of fatal situations.

Morgan Freeman lends his velvet voice to the blind wizard Vitruvius, who prophesied the coming of The Special. (Before he takes down a troop of baddies, Vitruvius intones, “Did you call me ‘old’? I like to think of it as ‘experienced’!”). And Will Arnett is the gravel-throated avenger of the night, Batman! (“I’m Batman!”) He’s Wyldstyle’s boyfriend. It’s really serious.

Charlie Day is Spaceman Benny, Alison Brie is Unikitty, and Nick Offerman is pirate Metal Beard. Many other superheroes like Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern appear, but no one seems to have any of their characters’ powers. They are just the Lego characters themselves.

You’ve probably seen many CGI Lego features, which utilize Lego figures like cartoons, where they seem pliable like Gumby. The plots and action are also geared toward a younger audience, so not too frenetic or intellectual. THE LEGO MOVIE is a total departure from that, uh, model. Structured to look like old-school stop-motion, each figure is bendable only at their real Lego joints (making for hilarious sight gags, as when Emmett does his morning exercises, bending his body backwards completely from his hip joints). The speed and complexity of the gags is also ramped up; it will take at least three viewings to absorb and appreciate this fulsome brickiness.

As a kid, I didn’t approve when Lego made a piece that was too specialized. Marketing Lego in smaller and smaller packages meant that certain pieces had to be uniquely fabricated. So in a kid’s package of 20 or less bricks, you’d see whole Lego people and whole chassis of Lego cars and whole fuselages of Lego planes, etc. I could accept the Lego figurines – they achieved the purpose of personalizing the clinical bricks and “connecting” with their target audience (me and ten million other kids) – but any other pre-built stuff, which should be achieved by construction rather than fabrication, I considered “cheating.”

Well, there is no cheating in THE LEGO MOVIE. Everything is built with resourcefulness, creativity and humor. From the credits to the town, to the psychedelic Cloud Cuckoo Land inhabited by Unikitty. Not only that, any scenery with “movement” – such as the roiling sea, crumbling buildings or flowering explosions – is constructed from millions of Lego bricks in countless stop-motion stages. It’s a wonder to behold!

There are laser battles, superhighways, pirate ships, stormy seas, breathtaking escapes, unique machine constructs, hair-raising chases, and two figurines who just want to clasp plastic yellow hands without Batman interrupting them.

The town of Bricksburg – for all its singing in unison “Everything is awesoooome / Everything is cool when you’re part of a team!” – seems to be an Orwellian dystopia, with everyone following the Instruction Booklet and slotting into a clockwork society. Emmett is portrayed as being one of millions of automatons who drive the same drive to work every day, sing the same song, drink the same drink, and lust the same lust for life. But when he tries to find someone to hang with after work, they all give him fake excuses. A commentary on automatons versus individuals, like METROPOLIS? No, just a device to show Emmett truly is “nothing special” amongst the morass of people who behave like sheep, yet display idiosyncrasies that sets each of them apart. Later, when Wyldstyle exhorts the town to become creative Master Builders to defeat Lord Business, they all easily comply. The trick was for Emmett – someone who truly thought like an automaton, and whom others thought of as one – to discover the specialness within himself, to defeat Lord Business and win the girl. This he does, in the form of a double-decker couch. Oh well…

Everything is still awesome.

END