The Lego Movie - Review

[IamLEAM1983]

Licensed movies are sort of hit-and-miss for me.

I had fun watching the first G.I. Joe movie and cringed at its sequel. I loathe all of Michael Bay's Transformers movies, but my childhood self will always have a special place for Transformers : The Movie. That is to say, the utterly Eighties flick in which Optimus Prime gifts the Prime Spark to Bumblebee (and the movie that gave us the immortal earworm that is Stan Bush's The Touch). Paul W.S. Anderson's two Mortal Kombat movies are my go-to fix for Late Nineties cheese, and my hazy preschool self can't really recall anything disagreeable about the berjillion Carebears movies; even if I have to admit that parroting basic schoolyard morals doesn't make for the deepest of high-quality entertainment.

Not that I cared, I was six or so.

Y'ever played with Legos as a kid? I remember the day my father gave me my first plastic bin, filled with dozens and dozens of colorful bricks and big green slats. If you dug in you'd find little flowers, coins, white dots and blue dots; minifigures broken up and severed heads that would always disappear in the dreaded, bottomless maw of the vaccuum cleaner. There was a horse, too, if I remember correctly. Nothing fit together, and my father's impulse was to build.

He was disappointed, because I never could do that. I'd look to all the bricks and all the colors and I wouldn't see a multiverse's worth of possibilities, I'd see daunting tools some sort of highly evolved and perennially logical mind could find entertainment in. Nah, I was a rebel. I got my Silly Putty out and stuck the minifigs in it; I buried them in Play-Doh and pretended the lump of green non-toxic material was some sort of space rock. The open air of the living room became the vast confines of space, and the asteroid would swoop in from parts unknown, the aliens trapped within awaiting nothing except the moment of impact to break free and wreak havoc on a metropolis that existed only in imaginary lines and frontiers determined by the living room's furniture.

I got a little older, and Dad got me smaller kits, maybe at a rhythm of one per two or three weeks. You know, the fast, quick, easy five-minute builds that cost about five bucks each? One little space shuttle here, minifig and blaster included. One pirate lifeboat there, skull-and-crossbones sail gratis. Every Christmas for about five years, he'd splurge on a huge set I'd been dreaming about. The crown jewel of the Ice Planet lineup, a capital ship that contained a satellite bay and two shuttles that could double as futuristic motor-skis. Or the stocky fortress from the Medieval lineup. A fire engine and the pirates' playset.

I loved them all to bits. The catch is I never assembled any of them. I never had the patience for it. I never could think outside the box the way the other kids I played with could. Give me a bunch of minifigs, a few props, an inspiring soundtrack of some kind and time on my hands; and I'd craft stories. I remember playing with a knight and an astronaut at one time, and Mom gave me a few Voortman oatmeal cookies. She was in the kitchen and I had some stupid crap on TV that served as my “I'm doing boring old kids' stuff” shield. It was probably Stunt Dawgs, if that rings a bell. One of those blissfully vapid shows that reigned supreme before the advent of the E/I regulations, those happy days in which product placements in the form of half-hour shows were considered kosher.

For some reason, the Dutch-iness of the word Voortman stuck in my head. It sounded neat. It sounded – dare I say – like a knight's name. For years, I'd pull out Voortman the Knight and the Space Guy's spaceship, put on Supertramp's Crime of the Century (which was still gibberish to me at the time) and just – play; following what I took to be the emotional cues in that big slate of Progressive Rock, the lilts and falls of Rick Davies' voice turning into bookmarks for Voortman's daunting interstellar adventure. I barely spoke a lick of English, but I didn't give two shits about what Crime of the Century was about. It was my jam, and I went to head-places with it.

Dad was more of the Builder type. Follow the instructions, put the thing together, spend a couple days going Woooosh! with it, then stow it on the top shelf of the basement's bookcase, where it would gather dust. I never really needed the big set-pieces, and that puzzled him. He was never able to go places like I could, with just about jack shit and too much imagination.

I guess I wouldn't have Hope as my own personal Lego set if it weren't for those minifigs.

The irony of it all is that Village Roadshow's The Lego Movie fits me like a glove. Not so much in its disparate-bricks-as-tools-for-creation philosophy (as that's still too Cartesian for me), but in how the minifigs all move. They're all part of a story. They all have a part to play. They're as alive as Voortman the Space Knight was for me. All the little props I kept re-purposing because I saw some other purpose in their shape are all there, all re purposed. It's a massive punch right in the nostalgia.

It helps that it's funny, too. Hilariously so.

The Lego Movie opens up with as formulaic a premise as you'd expect to find on a playset's assembly instructions. Emmet the builder is voiced by Chris Pratt, and he lives in Brickstown, a metropolis overseen by Lord Business, a tyrannical, if ever-so-smiling control freak voiced by Will Ferrell. He's a blissfully vapid guy, someone who's ever-so-happy whilst following the precise instructions for happiness the CEO-cum-ruler has dispensed throughout his city. Brickstown feels like George Orwell's 1984 if you stuck it on a steady regimen of uppers. As the metropolis' omni-earworm goes, everything is awesome.

One day, Emmet's work order includes the demolition of a now defunct building. The wrecking ball operations unfold according to plan, but the end of the work shift sees him fall down an unexpected shaft, deep underneath Brickstown. There, he finds the quasi-mystical Piece of Resistance, an oddly un-Lego-like hunk of plastic that seemingly glues itself to his back.

From that point on, the movie furiously sails along Bradford Wright Territory, all the while tearing it to bits with wild abandon. Emmett isn't just “The Special” because of his contact-glued non-Lego piece, but also because he, quite literally, is the most generic minifig to ever grace the Lego multiverse. He's got the brown parted haircut, the little beady eyes, the small smile – he literally is about 75% of all of Lego's produced minifigs. Ironically enough, this makes him the ideal Hero with a Thousand Faces. He fits in anywhere with a bit of work – okay, a below-the-neck body switch – and can stand in for anyone. As such, his journey is as textbook as you could imagine, while still being gleefully poked with holes by the script, which seems completely aware of how perfunctory the whole setup is.

So, Emmett teams up with Wyldstyle the Trinity-esque plastic Razorgirl (wouldn't it be Exacto-girl, technically?) and with another huge narrative template we've seen anywhere lately. If you haven't seen the posters or the trailers, you've been living under a rock – the point being that Emmett pairs up with Lego's rendition of Batman.

Mind you, this isn't quite any specific Batman. It isn't the Nolanverse's or the Arkhamverse's either, it isn't Paul Dini's or Frank Miller's (thank God!). No, this Caped Crusader is – well, he's a child's on-the-nose and extremely self-referential rendition of the character, if said child were completely aware of how much of a damaged and utterly horrible person Batman truly is. Will Arnett voices Batsy as though he were trying to smartly mock Christian Bale's interpretation of the character. The end result is a shallow, self-absorbed, faux-tortured slacker who delights in his extremely hackneyed attempts at badassitude. Assembling a Batwing for the plumetting cast out of nowhere, he quickly brags about how he's packed a totally sweet set of subwoofers in the design, and proceeds to use them to sing the most ridiculously accurate anthem for the Dark Knight's concept. The only defined lyrics are limited to “Super Dark”, “Dead Parents” and “Lots of Money”. The rest is just Batman trying to rock out on his own, like someone who finds their jam on the radio while having totally forgotten the lyrics.

I laughed out loud. Eat your heart out, Bale – Arnett is my new favorite Batman. I needed someone to poke DC Comics' lynch-pin and deflate him a little, seeing as of the last couple years, you couldn't hear much more than the waxing-on of incredibly pretentious pseudo-literary types who claimed that there hadn't been more tragic a figure than Gotham's champion.

No. I do not agree with that statement. I never have and never will. You want tragic? Try Antigone. Try Oedipus. Try Lear. Bruce fucking Wayne is rich and in no way is being pressured to avenge his parents' death. What the man needs and has always needed is a padded cell – not a gaggle of complicit cops and an endless circle-jerk about which possibly could have come first between the Bat or the Joker. We get it, they're joined at the hip, it's super-profound and shit – just stop. Stop.

I'll stop, too, before I go off on a tangent. What needs to be remembered is that if there ever needs to be a decent and worthwhile reboot of the Caped Crusader, seriousness and grit need to go out the window. A producer, somewhere, has to recognize the innately ridiculous aspects of the whole concept. That is all, I'll climb down from my Batman soapbox, now.

The unifying thread is that Batman and a few other themed figures are part of an order referred to as that of the Master Builders. Freudian slip, anyone? Think of them as the Neos of the Lego-verse, able to see new and unique brick configurations no matter where they look. Emmett is purported to be one of them by Morgan Freeman's amusing turn as Vitrivius the blind seer, but his being an incredibly blank guy makes it so he has trouble coming up with a single piece of original thought. His best idea for most of the movie is the highly-impractical Double-Decker Couch, until he realizes that following laid-out instructions to the letter might be his strength.

Throughout the movie, you'll see nods to the world beyond that of the Lego minifigs, primarily in the form of “relics”, which are mundane objects from our world that have been held in great reverence and fear by the Lego-peoples. The Piece of Resistance is said to stop the all-consuming powers of the “Kragle”, just as the Relic Room contains the “Band of Ayd”, which looks like...

...an old, hairy Band-Aid someone forgot.

All of this comes to life with an unusually witty script, yes, but also with startling cinematography. Everything is stop-motion based, except for those obvious shots that are too complex to call for anything except CGI. Of those, the emotes of the minifigs are flawlessly executed, breathing life in those little mugs and blank, merely suggestive faces. The cast it great, as I've mentioned, and even includes an amusing turn from Liam Neeson as what sounds like a Brian Mills parody. Playing as a sort of plastic, Danish turn on Masters of the Universe's Man-E-Faces, one side of his face is a mirrorshades-donning badass of a police officer, while the other sports round little glasses and an amusingly high pitch and lisp. Flip-flopping between Good Cop and Bad Cop, Neeson showcases an unheard-of talent for bits and pieces of screwball comedy and hilarious send-offs to the stereotype of the Aging Asskicker that's been sticking to him for the better part of fourteen years. It's not quite a Schindler's List-able performance, of course, but it's a nice change of pace from “I have a very particular set of skills and I behave like any other textbook Luc Besson-created face-rearranger.”

Morgan Freeman stands out, in my book. It really feels as though he figured he'd tear his typecasted Wise Mentor tendencies apart with sudden injections of non-sequiturs and the most hilarious Tragic Death I've seen in years.

Remember how Ledger-Joker's “magic trick” made you laugh and cringe? This'll make you cringe and laugh, instead of the other way around, and the difference is huge. Freeman gives it his all, as he always does – and then purposefully wrecks the whole thing in such a way as to create spit-takes of sudden laughter, guaranteed. Honestly, Vitruvius has wormed his way into my heart as another one of my favorites in Freeman's roles – precisely because he's so non-standard.

The cameos are legion, the performances are inspired – you'd figure it's a shoo-in, right? Well, what really bugs me is how some people are being offended by the movie's stance. Its villain is a CEO, and Fox News has jumped the gun and declared the movie anti-Capitalist for it. Trawl the movie's reviews, and you'll always find the one shrill Right-wing troll who wrecks the entire thing for everyone else by claiming it was made by and for “bleeding-heart Liberals”.

Again, that's the same for me as when I hear someone extol Batman's boundless virtues. The CEO is now a cultural trope, in and of itself. The CEO as a generic concept does not speak of any Real-World Chief Executive Officers. Some of them will be model citizens and others will be assholes, and model-citizen CEOs do not offer opportunities for an object lesson. They are, narratively speaking, boring.

Saying this does not make me a Communist, it makes me a realist.

I just wish I could beat those words into a few brains with a jackhammer, seriously.

Plus, the entire fucking thing is based on a corporation's produced toy. It's a great, big, joyous heap of product placement for old and new Lego playsets, but it's product placement with moxie, as opposed to the empty, moral-of-the-day sauce that served as the linking substance for my childhood's other bits of televized plastic.

That said, I adored every minute of it. It made me dig out Voortman the Space Knight and give him a fond look before dropping him in the big box of as-of-yet unsold childhood toys that's brooding in the corner of the garage.

I've never been much of a Master Builder in the sense the movie intends, but it celebrates the life I breathed into these bits of plastic all the same. I'm more of an Intermediate and Occasionally Fumbling Dreamer, but I thrive on the same basic type of fuel – the joy provided by something simple, the canvas it offers for interpretation and reflexion, or maybe even simply escapism.