2017 Film Review: The Emoji Movie (2017)

Directed by: Tony Leondis
Written by: Tony Leondis, Eric Siegel, Mike White
Starring: T.J Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris
IMDb Link

I watched a movie earlier today that contained a scene involving a crowd of people eating the flesh of a newborn baby, and The Emoji Movie is still the most sickening thing I've experienced today.

The Emoji Movie is a poorly constructed piece of advertising masquerading as a movie. The whole film is built around trying to sell its audience on the companies that paid money to have their apps featured in what can't even be considered a plot. There's some shallow messages about being yourself and valuing close friends, but they're so hackneyed and forced face-first into more advertising disguised as dialogue that not even a shadow of a theme is in any way engaging or interesting, or hasn't been done better many tines over in such films as Wreck-It Ralph or The LEGO Movie. The rest of the movie is filled with constant praise of digital consumerism, just a barrage of reminders that phones and apps are necessary for existence. This is truly not just a terrible movie, but a terrible movie to show kids as well.

Beyond the complete lack of engagement it offers, there's nothing that The Emoji Movie even tries to succeed at. Nothing makes any sort of sense from a story perspective, the film lacks any kind of internal consistency and offers blandly flashy animation while bored voice actors give the bare minimum for their paychecks. Nothing about this movie offers anything of value to humanity, and the whole thing ends up being an obscene affront to storytelling in a way few films have been able to attain.

Consider this review also part of my "A Look at the Worst" series, because this is sincerely the worst movie I have seen in cinemas this year.

The Verdict: The Emoji Movie is completely terrible in every imaginable way. It's not a movie, it's an 86-minute advertisement that's bad  for anyone young enough to be influenced by the film, and insulting to everyone else. Don't see it. Just don't.

Rating: 1/10

Published September 14th, 2017

*Edit: I was asked by a friend how bad it was, and I elaborated a little more on some of the things I particularly disliked about it, so I thought I'd put my response here:

t was one of the worst cinematic experiences of my life. It's a disgustingly in-your-face advertisement for Candy Crush, Just Dance, Spotify and Drop Box that offers consumerist messages about the necessity of phones and apps and how great they and indeed emojis are, while lazily hamfisting half-arsed attempts at shallow understanding of issues like "it's ok to be yourself" and "value close friends" so that it can pretend to be a kid's movie. The main character's arc is literally to learn to be himself, but his issues are almost entirely unique to him and stem from being only able to express one emotion in the first place. It's so lazily put together that it seems like an afterthought; "don't worry about whether or not Gene is growing or changing as a person, you'll see that through the incredible fun he has playing that Just Dance app". Nothing is internally consistent or comes with any explicit or thematic explanation, changing rules it created less than five minutes before so that it can move the conflict forward when it needs to. At one point a bad guy can't access an app because an upgrade it received was malware and "dropbox is secure" (yes, they shamelessly advertise and consider the product before the plot), but then it breaks through later anyway without any explanation as to how or why it could do that. Funnily enough the scenes outside the phone make out these apps to be pretty terrible and malfunctional, which I'm pretty sure is not the message the advertisers wanted to send: "hey, our apps are so easily jailbroken that they'll potentially fuck up your social life, aren't they great?" There's also a side story about Gene's parents breaking up and getting back together that ultimately means nothing and is only so protracted as to pad out the runtime. It could've potentially been mediocre, the idea that the mother blames herself for supporting her son despite his "multi-emotional malfunction" but the cause actually coming from the dad could've been interesting if they'd actually done anything with it beyond using it as the excuse to bring the parents back together, but as it is it's just filler that reminds you how lazily this story was put together. Apart from that, the film is nothing but ripoffs of other, far better movies and some cheap, forcibly inserted feminism. Short answer: I hate this movie.