Patrick Stewart talks s **** (…and that’s the good bit!)
The Emoji Movie (G) HH is fast becoming one of the worst reviewed films of 2017 and, at first, it’s difficult to see why. After all, it’s colourful, energetic and based in one of those secret inner worlds that are the key to success of so many great animated feature films.
But while the excellent and markedly similar Inside Out brought the emotions of an unhappy young girl to life, The Emoji Movie deals with the inner workings of a mobile phone and, particularly, the emoji characters who live in the city of Textopolis.
It’s here that Gene (TJ Miller), a young ‘meh’ emoji – for the uninitiated, used to express general world-weariness – is preparing for his first day of work.
But he blows it and, faced with deletion he makes a run for the Cloud, accompanied by a hacker known as Jailbreak (Anna Faris) and the Hi-Five emoji voiced by a horribly overindulged James Corden.
Yup, we’re off on a redemptive journey again.
The script is thin and derivative, and much of the humour falls flat. Its only saving grace is a game Patrick Stewart, as the voice of what Americans call the poop emoji.
Morrissey is best known as the melancholic frontman of the Eighties post-punk band The Smiths and for writing that much-quoted line ‘Heaven knows I’m miserable now’.
Sadly, we’re all going to be miserable after watching England Is Mine (15A) the story of his early years in Manchester, which, infuriatingly, features barely a note of The Smiths or, indeed, much of the wonderfully evocative music of the period at all.
Instead, director and cowriter Mark Gill (The Voorman Problem) concentrates on Morrissey’s less than thrilling 1976-1982 period, when apparently Morrissey (played here by Jack Lowden, pictured) spent a lot of time being miserable at home, being miserable working at Britain’s Inland Revenue and being regularly rescued from despair by improbably pretty young women. Early nomination for Most Irritating Film of the Year goes to Maudie (12A) based on the true story of a small, slightly physically impaired Nova Scotia woman, who was abandoned by her family and found solace working for a brutish fish peddler, only to marry him and discover a talent for naive art. The tone is unrelentingly mawkish, the pace unbearably slow and both Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke overact horribly in the central roles.