At this point in their joint careers, co-writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller seem to have made taking on projects that sound utterly unwatchable on paper their specialty. I say this because every movie they’ve made so far (except for their sequel) has sounded absolutely awful to me going in, and then they all end up being surprisingly delightful experiences nonetheless. With Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs they made a children’s movie with a ridiculous premise about a world that rained food something that adults could enjoy. With 21 Jump Street they turned a remake of a cheesy TV show from the 80s into the funniest comedy of its year—without going the lazy route of embracing cheese and making it a parody. And now, with The Lego Movie, they’ve taken what is essentially a 100 minute commercial for a line of children’s toys and turned it into the most entertaining and affecting animated family film to come out of Hollywood since at least Rango.
What exactly does a movie about little plastic building blocks look like? Lord and Miller have turned the various Lego play sets that have been sitting on toy store shelves for years into dense, expansive worlds, and have populated them with little plastic people who have been brought to life with some kind of souped up and CG-assisted stop-motion animation aesthetic. The living mini-figures include a wide array of characters, from generic everyday folk to Lego’s various licensed characters like Batman, Gandalf, and Milhouse Van Houten. Given the fact that Lego’s product line contains play sets for modern cities, medieval castles, old west towns, pirate ships, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and who knows what else, you’d think that a movie that tries to cram in as much of the company’s commercial offerings as possible would be a bloated mess, but under the pen of Lord and Miller, The Lego Movie not only creates a mythology that allows all of these different set pieces to co-exist alongside of each other, it also manages to tell a pretty effective adventure tale.
To get too into the specifics of the plot would be pointless, but the basic gist of the story here is that the Lego world is controlled by an evil guy named Lord Business (Will Farrell) who keeps all of the different Lego neighborhoods separate and makes sure that all Lego pieces are used to build things exactly according to the instructions. The good guys are a group of rebels opposing him, the master builders, who want to mix all of the different types of Lego pieces up to create hodgepodge concoctions of their own creation. The rebels have a prophecy that one day a master builder called “The Special” will come along, find a magical piece, and use it to take down Lord Business and end his reign of order. That’s a pretty good prophecy for them to have up their sleeve, until the guy who finally comes along and finds said piece winds up being the most ordinary, uncreative, by the book, average Joe the Lego world has ever known—a dingus of a construction worker named Emmet (Chris Pratt).
Emmet is a guy who follows the instructions not only when it comes to his construction job, but also in every other aspect of his life. He listens to the same song that everyone else likes, he watches the same TV show that everyone else likes, and he tries to get the other figures to like him by being the guy who most easily fits in with the society that surrounds him. Unfortunately for him, instead of making him popular, this strategy has made him invisible. Fortunately for everyone, his newfound status as the chosen one will see him going off on an adventure that not only teaches him how to discover what is unique and special about himself, but that also allows Lord and Miller to tell a pretty subversive story that does do a lot to sell Legos, sure, but that also criticizes the Lego company for turning their back on their roots as a toy that promoted creativity in children in order to follow the more profitable path of creating licensed play sets that have already come, fully-formed, out of the imaginations of Hollywood content creators. It’s an interesting “have your cake and eat it too” approach that allows the filmmakers to do the dirty business of making a piece of art that advertises a product while still being able to tell a story that promotes weirdness and creativity over conformity and profit-mongering.
The reason people are going to like The Lego Movie so much isn’t because of how it subverts corporate interests and lampoons our culture of trash TV and empty pop music though, they’re going to like it because it’s so damned hilarious, consistently, from beginning to end. Let me be more clear about that, so we’re fully on the same page. This isn’t a movie that’s pretty funny for a kid’s movie. It’s not one of those animated abominations that throws a bone to parents every once in a while in the form of a subtly bawdy joke. It’s not even family entertainment that’s perfectly pleasant to everyone, like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It’s a legitimately hilarious comedy, even more so than the surprisingly funny 21 Jump Street.
One of the main reasons The Lego Movie is so funny is that it’s so clearly a product of its creators’ sensibilities, lacking any visible corporate influence or studio-mandated compromise anywhere. Lord and Miller seem to have been told that they need to feature a bunch of Legos in their movie, but have otherwise been given total freedom beyond that, and in response to said freedom they’ve stuffed their film to bursting with gags. They wrote jokes both low-minded and high-minded, both abstract and easily-digestible, but all are funny. These guys share a great sense of timing and delivery, and they’ve utilized it here to create the funniest feature they’ve made to date.
The other big reason the comedy is so effective is that they’ve put together an all-star voice cast of all the funniest people currently working in the entertainment industry. It’s kind of hard not to produce some laughs when you go and do that. We’ve already mentioned Farrell and Pratt, and they’ve both brought the oblivious arrogance and enthusiastic innocence you know them for to their characters here, so you know the main protagonist and antagonist are in good hands. Plus, in addition to them you have Elizabeth Banks bringing her charm to Emmet’s love interest, Will Arnett bringing his smarm to Batman, Alison Brie bringing her perkiness to a half-cat/half-unicorn named Unikitty, Charlie Day bringing his energy to an excitable spaceman, Nick Offerman growling the lines of a pirate, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill reuniting as a bickering Superman and Green Lantern, and many more surprise cameos than would be polite to mention.
So, as a comedy The Lego Movie is first rate, but how does it fare as an adventure film? Not bad at all. The story told is a patchwork of a bunch of narratives that you have already seen and loved, but with enough of a Lego spin on them that it doesn’t all feel completely derivative. There’s quite a bit of the original Star Wars trilogy in here, a ton of Toy Story, a dash of The Matrix, and, improbably, a healthy dose of the through-the-looking-glass nature of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Lego Movie is focused enough on loud noises and toys running around that little kids will be able to enjoy it, but it also includes quite a few surprises that make it unlike any other mainstream animated feature you’re likely to see anytime soon. Simply put: it rules.
