Hating
The Emoji Movie is easy—not to mention fun, necessary and appropriate. It’s like Donald Trump: Though it represents humanity’s worst tendencies (laziness, vulgarity, cynicism) and we groan under the indignities suffered at its cartoonish hands, there’s comfort in having an enemy who’s entirely despicable. You can blast away all day long and never feel like you’ve gone too far. Borrowing from
Toy Story,
Wreck-It Ralph and the fever dreams of a syphilitic vaudevillian, it's set inside a smartphone, where the “meh” emoji, Gene (voice of T.J. Miller), is struggling because he has a variety of emotions when he’s only supposed to have one. Aided by his friend Hi-5 (James Corden) and a hacker named Jailbreak (Anna Faris), Gene leaves the text app in search of Dropbox and then the cloud, where he hopes to be reprogrammed as a perfect, single-faced emoji. Along the way are countless easy references (not quite “jokes”) to Candy Crush, Spotify, et al., culminating in an insincere message about ... friendship? I guess? It’s an unworkable premise that nobody thought would actually become a movie, and yet it did become a movie, and it’s as bad as everyone said it would be. Make movies great again!
By
Eric D. Snider