Here it is guys, one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. I’ll say it straight up. This film is complete garbage. All I will say is I’m surprised they managed to get any sort of movie out of the concept of an emoji, but then again, this isn’t much of a movie.
So, in the world of a phone, all the emojis are alive and have to act out their certain image when the kid using the phone chooses them. Gene is a ‘meh’, but somehow has the ability to show other emotions. So he does it wrong when chosen and runs away to risk deletion. He teams up with a ‘high-five’ and a hacker named Jailbreak to get past the firewall and change his code so he can be ‘meh’ and only ‘meh’. Look, credit to the writers for coming up with a story that seems to touch on themes of having different emotions and being yourself whilst getting some little emoji things to go on and adventure, but it’s no good at all. It’s trying to be ‘Inside Out‘ and ‘Wreck-It Ralph‘ with a bit of ‘The Lego Movie‘ thrown in too, but it fails in almost every single way.
The cast is one of those ways. T. J. Miller plays the ‘meh’ with as much enthusiasm as you’d expect from that emoji. There’s little emotion and seemingly no will to actually participate in the movie. And he’s the best actor in this thing! Anna Faris is Jailbreak and does about equally as well as Miller, but the two of them have little chemistry together and again, very little emotion. Then there’s James Corden as the ‘high-five’, possibly the worst and easily most annoying character in this film. The character itself is selfish, annoying and unlikable with no redemptive arc, and Corden is just as annoying and unlikable. I couldn’t stand any scene he was in. And do you know what’s even worse about this film? They dragged in poor Patrick Stewart to voice the ‘poop’ emoji! THE POOP! Why? All he does is make jokes and puns about poo. It’s horrible…
One thing this film does excel at though is having a terrible habit of taking everything computer, phone and internet related and stuffing it into the movie as a plot device. The characters surf through Spotify, use Dropbox to get to places and must navigate the enormous, burning Firewall at the end. Not to mention there’s Just Dance, mention of internet trolls, viruses and Facebook. It’s like one big advertisement for apps. It’s all so forced and heavy handed with talk about online friends vs. real friends and trolls being not very nice. I hardly imagine the 5 year old this film is aimed at having any real comprehension of what most of these references are even about!
There’s no redeeming features about this movie, except maybe that the animation is fairly good. The love stories don’t feel real or earned, the characters are all horrible, the jokes are the worst ever (I laughed once and it was at the most stupid moment of someone laughing and slapping the poop because someone else talked about wiping) and it’s all so forced and cheap. Everything in this movie just seems offensive. I get that the studios only want to make money, but with emojis? Seriously?! Nobody in the world was asking for a movie about emojis! Nobody! It just didn’t need to be done. Again, I’m surprised they managed to wring any sort of story out of it at all, but there you go. The finished product really speaks volumes.
Seriously, this film is a real stinker. It’s the living embodiment of a poop emoji and it left me looking like an angry emoji with an emoji gun to my head. It’s so soul destroying and terrible. Boring, forced and unfunny. It doesn’t even feel like they were trying to be sincere in the making of this film. It’s all just so bad. It may be one of the worst I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some real stinkers.
JACK’S SCORE: 0/5
Yeah. It sure does happen.
Jack-Types-Stuff 