"The Emoji Movie" review

Meh doesn't even begin to cover it.

It’s a movie about emojis; a film about 1 note symbols of virtual communication that defy the necessities of basic storytelling by sheer virtue of existing for their designated purpose.

Attempting to extrapolate a narrative out of nonliving communicative symbols desiring to defy the only reason they exist as a concept to cash in on a minor phenomenon of the digital age is tantamount to trying to make a movie about the letters of the alphabet.

Yet “The Emoji Movie” is perhaps even dumber than that because individual letters at least have unique quirks of grammar functionality and phonetic characteristics regarding how they stand alone and string together with other letters. I’m going to abandon this train of thought before I inadvertently give a Sony executive ideas.

I know what you may be thinking dear reader; “please, regale us with your eye witness account of a fast moving soulless rehash of every low rent kids cartoon feature’s story structure as a backdrop to sell virtual applications in a stream of never ending puns and visual gags that never land a single intentional chuckle from a setting spouting off tech jargon with all the knowledge display of a mother that doesn’t even know what the term ‘wallpaper’ refers to.”

Sadly, you may leave disappointed if that is the case. “The Emoji Movie” is the single most transparently pitiful cash grab of a flick that I have possibly seen in my lifetime up to this point on a big screen and while I’m often all about delving a little bit deeper into things to figure out what went wrong, It would be easier, yet equally counterproductive for me to struggle coming up with a list of what went right.

Now compound that assessment onto the reality that everybody seems to be aware of this and far from shocked at how pathetic, meandering, confused, cynical, pandering, and outright annoying the final product is but still somehow floored that it sucks just as badly as it does. That’s the cherry on top of the whole ordeal.

It’s obvious that this could have been done better but the world seems to be so floored by how badly it turned out that they seem to forget that the better version of this thing was still being condemned after the first trailer. The best possible version of this thing was never going to not suck substantially on some level.

On that note, I’m also not going to play contrarian to stop the dog piling this film will receive from a culture desperate to read, hear and talk about but not put their own asses on the line to show off battle scars.

In the long history of bad movies stretching across nearly a century, I can’t definitively say  whether or not “The Emoji Movie” is one of the worst films ever made but using that as a pseudo defense of something you know is still terrible is like saying my experience with an injury that has critically punctured my aorta and left me anemic for 2 or 3 days wasn’t that horrible of an experience because I didn’t die from it. It still fucking sucks. But then again, you probably already knew that ahead of time.

Instead, what I would like to do is talk about the realization that I had upon watching the movie and the revelation that I had on where I stand with almost anything in the entertainment industry in general that was quite the eye opener.

Last year I was treated to the cinematic “treasure” of “Max Steel,” a YA infused superhero movie based on the Mattel toy line of the same name that was so hollow, dull, lazy, uninspired, bored, boring, and transparent in its sole desire to support commercialism that it solidified its position as my first 1 out of 10 rating when I actively chose a 7 minute nap over the movie’s reward of my saint-like patience with a proper superhero on villain brawl.

We always like to think of the abyss of entertainment as something painful and harmful, perhaps even rage inducing or soul crushingly depressing in the achievement of some sort of moral or intellectual depravity that we never thought was possible to be supported in film.

Well I have now seen the abyss twice and have learned just how unambiguous it is. It isn’t pain or suffering that spike proper emotional reaction. It’s nothingness. Soul sucking, energy sapping, nothingness that will make casually spout off a despisal of your existence without wallowing in rage or self-pity.

My abyss is sitting down for an hour to two hours to realize that nothing in the world was accomplished in that moment.

“The Emoji Movie” is an hour and a half long. In its final 45 minutes I had completely given up, fiddling with my phone browser and social media for about 10 minutes before polishing off my popcorn and cherry coke and proceeding to take a decent 5 minute nap in my theaters footrest containing recliners.

The only thing that kept me in that seat was my personal promise to never prematurely walk out of a movie and the second all of the emojis gathered in a club as a pop song was playing in the background, the thought of putting 2 and 2 together regarding what was coming next hadn’t even entered my mind as I found myself walking to the door right as the emojis announced their big end credit dance number.

I didn’t look back. I just wanted to go home.

1 out of 10

It does't deserve the effort of a rating distinction.