Hidden within a nobody teen's totally-not-a-iPhone lies a living universe of apps, including the world of Messages, here nicknamed Textopolis, where the denizens consist entirely of sentient emoji icons. Gene, who's the newly assigned embodiment of the expression "meh", goes on the run from anti-virus robots after being labeled a "malfunction" by his superiors and must find a way outside his app to reset his soul and stop being different. THE EMOJI MOVIE is Sony's evil machination to pour down a belittling swill of rampant product placement, corporate interest and 100-proof utter nonsense down the throats of kids. Realizing that they need a story to sucker in children beside all the bright colors and dancing scenes, Sony Pictures Animation, director Tony Leondis and his co-writers Eric Siegel and Mike White just copied and pasted the script from WRECK-IT RALPH and scribbled some new things over it including "insert internet meme here". I'm dead serious when I say it's just WRECK-IT RALPH again but done bad because it includes the following: a goofy male main protagonist who wants to be more than just his programming, a character designated as a "glitch" whose existence could theoretically wipe out a world, a female punky outsider, a literal secret princess, an extended sequence at a candy-covered world, a party area where the "good" people hang out at, and a villainous authority figure who smiles a lot but barks out evil orders. When they aren't cribbing from Disney, the makers filled out the open pages in the script with whatever corporate sponsorship that they were able to secure. Why tell a compelling narrative of any kind when you can get some extra advertising money by shoehorning in Candy Crush, Just Dance, YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter and Dropbox? Unfortunately for them, no amount of dirty ole green stuff can clog up the massive plot holes they left bare. The Grand Canyon of these inconsistencies is that the main characters say that they need to jump through several apps in order to reach their ultimate destination except it's been very well established that they can just run around the apps on the phone's wallpaper and make the trip ten times shorter!
I really want to rail further against the absolutely horrendous plot including how the makers don't know how cell phones work, how they developed a romantic subplot only to then drop it in a catastrophic fashion or the dystopian hellscape they created where the real world consists entirely of everyone speaking to each other through emojis not texts but let's move on to the film's other detriments. The movie is flat out unfunny. All of the humor is groan worthy at best and whenever a joke falls on his face the makers just toss in an ill-advised movie reference. The most torturous running gag even for little kiddies is when Gene's meh parents, voiced by Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge, go on the search for their son and have every conversation with each other play out in a lifeless tone. Speaking of the cast, they are utterly wasted by the tripe beings they lent their voices to. I don't know who got it worst: Anna Faris as one of the worst written female leads in a modern animated film or Sir Patrick Stewart forcibly spewing out poop puns as the poop emoji? The lone stinker in the bunch however is the otherwise talented James Corden as Hi-5, who's naturally the high five emoji. A character that could have been written out of the movie and nothing would change beside the lack of fat jokes, Hi-5 further becomes a burden to the picture thanks to Corden's obnoxious delivery and unceasing dialogue. THE EMOJI MOVIE is about as soulless as you can get with an animated feature. Not since FOODFIGHT! has there been this big of a corporate infused mess. But hey, at least there are no food Nazis and rampant sexual themes in this one, save for a internet porn joke.
FINAL REVIEW: 1 / 5
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