Lego Movie wildly creative
Part product placement, part really insane product placement, and part something else — mayhem, mostly, with a side dish of running amok — The Lego Movie is an unusual, sometimes brilliant film about the world of little plastic people with hook hands and hollow feet that fit into round clips.
The Lego Movie lets a group of Hollywood animators into the presumed world of a child’s imagination. This is the Lego story your seven-year-old might have invented. If he were Timothy Leary.
That’s also the genius of it. The movie is about the strictures of “official” Lego, with its plans and suggested creations, versus the devilmay-care Lego that’s built out of the chaotic spirit of childhood fantasy. The message is familiar from the Toy Story franchise: Games were meant to be played with, not collected or regulated by a bunch of adultsonly rules.
The Lego Movie turns the Danish-made building blocks into stiff computeranimated characters with mobile painted-on features to tell a story borrowed from a thousand Hollywood films, many of which — from Star Wars to Batman to The Lord of the Rings — are touched on in passing, and frequently knocked over as well.
As an added bonus, Abraham Lincoln, Wonder Woman and the 2002 NBA all-star team also have cameos. Why? Why not.
The plot has Emmet (Chris Pratt), a construction figurine who follows all the Lego rules (“All he does is say yes to what everyone else is doing”), being mistaken for the legendary Master Builder of Lego lore.
A group of rebels, led by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) — although she also answers to Lucy — and her boyfriend Batman (Will Arnett), want Emmet to fulfil the ancient prophecy and use the “piece de resistance” to thwart the evil President Business (Will Ferrell).
President Business is not so much a villain as a superego: a control freak (he has an army of Micro Managers) who can’t stand the unauthorized Lego creatures being built by free spirits.
It’s a hallucinogenic commercial that’s wildly creative — you never know what’s coming next — even if its heart comes in a tacked-on meta-story that’s a burlesque of animated children’s films. By then, though, you’re dizzy with it.
It’s a highly sophisticated interlocking brick system indeed.