LEGO comes to life in this stop-motion-simulating adventure. The giggle-inducing gags will infect humans of any age with their zany sense of humour, writes Liam Maguren.
The LEGO Movie
A five star film is often perceived as either ‘an emotionally crippling experience’ or ‘cinema on the brink of revolutionary’. While The LEGO Movie certainly isn’t an intense psychoanalytical musing on the human condition (thank God), it is an animated family film so joyously creative, so continuously hilarious and so hyper-aware of what it means to play with LEGO that future product-based movies of its ilk should use it as a template. If that’s not a cinematic revolution, it’s definitely dancing on the brink of it.
Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) focus their signature wit through the comedy styling of Robot Chicken’s animation director Chris McKay, creating perfectly timed chuckles that get the most out of limited – but no less visually gorgeous – stop-mo LEGO movement. From Chris Pratt’s Emmet stretching his back in the morning at a 90 degree angle to Liam Neeson’s Bad Cop trying to make sarcastic quotation marks with his claw hands, the giggle-inducing gags will infect humans of any age with their zany sense of humour.
The premise, with its “prophecy” that calls on “the special one” to “save the world” while trying to “win the girl” in the process, may seem very derived and conventional. And it is, but for all the right reasons – reasons that become resoundingly clear in the third act. It’s an ingenious wrap-up with the kind of take-home message that – much like Toy Story 3 before it – should send many kids and adults running back to their toy chest.
