All in all, it’s just another brick
The Lego Ninjago Movie
(out of 4) Animated comedy featuring the voices of Dave Franco, Justin Theroux, Kumail Nanjiani, Abbi Jacobson, Michael Pena, Fred Armisen and Zach Woods. Directed by Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher and Bob Logan. Opens Friday at GTA theatres. 101 minutes. G
For movie franchises, novelty becomes tedium around the time of the third chapter, when the fresh idea has turned as stale as a half-eaten box of popcorn stashed under a theatre seat.
Which brings us to The Lego Ninjago Movie, No. 3 in the series of anthropomorphized Lego toys, and the bloom is definitely off the brick. The anarchic spirit and spitball humour of The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie have been replaced by characters and gags from a faulty assembly line.
Everything feels manufactured but nothing really connects in this ninja-themed adventure, which is ironic given that Lego is all about painted-on smiles and snap-on connections.
The haphazard nature of the movie is hardly surprising, given that it has three directors — Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher and Bob Logan — and nine credited writers.
Yet it must be said that they at least try for novelty at the outset, in a live-action prologue where a curiosity shop owner played by Jackie Chan is spinning whimsy to a curious kid and the shop’s “evil” bored cat.
“You must forget everything you know and see things in a new way,” Chan’s Mr. Liu says, but this turns out to be easier said than done.
Ahuge part of the appeal of the first two Lego movies was pinballing through the parodies of innumerable popular icons, with everybody from Batman to Gandalf being ripe for riotous riffing.
The boldfaces are MIA this time, replaced by Lego’s lesser-known line of Ninjago characters and a story of dastardly daddy issues that is as inevitable as reports of mayhem on Good Morning Ninjago, the breakfast TV show for the titular island metropolis.
Clockwork chaos comes via warlord Garmadon (Justin Theroux), who resembles an ancient push-button telephone and who delights in disrupting civic affairs and busting up infrastructure — this, in a city that also has to deal with an active volcano.
Garmadon is regularly confronted by a squad of colour-coded teenage nonmutant ninja mortals, voiced by Dave Franco, Kumail Nanjiani, Abbi Jacobson, Michael Pena, Fred Armi- sen and Zach Woods. They’re led by a wise but impatient ancient named Master Wu (Chan again).
The green costume of Franco’s ninja somehow hides the fact that his alter-ego is a high schooler named Lloyd (although Garmadon pronounces it “Luh-loyd,” a joke that isn’t even funny the first time).
Lloyd is on the receiving end of snark and bullying from his classmates because he’s the unhappy son of Garmadon, who besides being a megalomaniac is also a neglectful dad and serial butt-dialer.
And so it goes in a story that leftturns into the woods surrounding Ninjago, with Master Wu playing power ballads on his flute, and proceeds to get lost there in a strained mash-up of Asian action movies, kiddie cartoons and feel-good family bromides.
Meanwhile, back in Ninjago, a bored monster named Meowthra (geddit?) is picking up where Garmadon temporarily left off.
The green and organic look and feel of the film’s rural sideshow is certainly a departure from previous Lego pictures, yet it somehow manages to also seem fake, routine and unfunny.
Which is a weird thing to say about aproperty built with toy bricks. But if this franchise has accomplished anything, it’s been to set the bar high for plastic comedy.