*soft groan* Beautiful day to see The Emoji Movie. I'm dressing pretty formal. Just so maybe they take me a bit more seriously, a bit. It's the fucking Emoji Movie, so I doubt it. Sorry dogs, I've got better things to do than, you know, feed you and stuff. Because I'm seeing the -- The Emoji Movie. On the 4th of January 2016, I made a video on emojis that mention The Emoji Movie, when it was in early production. I predicted that: 'in 2017 there's going to be an emoji movie. It's going to be about the odd-one-out loser emoji and there's going to be a joke about Twitter or Instagram in the trailer.' And while I don't think there was actually a joke about Instagram or Twitter in the trailer, there sure are two huge scenes completely dedicated to each one of them in the actual movie. And not to give myself too much credit, but I think I was 100% right in my prediction. Surprise, surprise, the movie about emojis that was written and directed by talent who have only released mediocre or garbage movies was bad. Let's all revel in how unexpected that is. But the real question for me is, 'how bad is it?' That was what drove me to seeing it, at least. You see, despite my name I do like to give things the benefit of the doubt, when reasonable. Why would I want a movie to be bad? But this movie had everything going against it from day uno. And deservedly so. How do you even begin to criticize that which, in and of itself, is an idea so terrible that even the most talented directors and writers would struggle to make this even remotely passable. 'Stop! Stop Stop! She has to stop!" "I see now what you are saying?" I remember when the first trailer dropped; it was hated in a similar way to the Ghostbusters reboot. It is joyous to see that every now and again, the people of the world will put their foot down and just say, 'NO.' 'No, Emoji Movie, you will not get away from this unscathed.' And it hasn't. At the time of me writing this, The Emoji Movie is the sixth lowest rated film of all time on IMDB. Honestly, I can't really decide if it's all deserved. Certainly there are films I personally hate more than The Emoji Movie, but on the other hand, I don't think there's a more egregious and offensive example of Hollywood's clueless, money drunken, cynical, defenseless product of a movie. You know what? The more I think about it, the more impossible to defend it is. The lowest rated big-budget Hollywood movies I've rated in Search For The Worst, at least, are The Last Airbender and Suicide Squad. And you know what? At least I can say that they *are* films. Even if they are bad films that do fall flat on their face. But The Emoji Movie is not a film. It just isn't. It's a colorful, pretty blur of motions being used as a sneaky dispenser... for advertisements. The Emoji Movie needs to have "movie" in the title to remind us that it is, in fact, a movie. Because, you see, once the adverts that play before any movie seemingly came to a close, to my utter dismay, another 80 minutes of advertisements started to play, and once these adverts were over, I walked out of the theater because the credits were rolling. Not only did I just pay money to watch eighty minutes of adverts, but I also paid money to humiliate myself in front of a small army of children who just saw The Emoji Movie, because they didn't know any better. So The Emoji Movie, or, "The Advertisement" as I'll be calling it from now on, is split into sections. There are four different plot threads being presented at once, the first being about a kid, who, *ha-dee-ha-ha bloody ha', is also called Alex, yes, how funny, who owns the phone in which all the emojis in the movie live. The second is the main plot about the meh emoji called Gene, and played by T.J. Miller, who is our Central Protagonist. The third plot is about Gene's parents, and the fourth plot is about the main villain who's trying to stop Gene. The world of the emojis relies on every single emoji being good at their one thing. The crying emoji always has to be crying, the smiling emoji always has to be smiling, the shy emoji always has to be shy, yada yada yada, you get the idea. Issues start to come up when Gene, who is a "meh", is struggling to stay being a "meh" because he expresses other emotions, such as happiness or sadness. On his first day of officially being a meh, he panics and ruins the extremely contrived machine that Is used by the emojis to beam up their faces to Alex's phone, so: 'Oh, no! How terrible! Alex sends the wrong emoji to the girl he likes! He meant to send her "meh", but instead he sent something else'. This is when the villain, Smiler, played by Maya Rudolph, tries to delete Meh from existence because he's just about ruined everything and jeopardized every other emojis' lives in the process. Smiler is kind of the dictator of the emoji world so she sends weird tracker robots to hunt down Gene and also Hi-5 who tags along with Gene for reasons that don't matter, other than they needed an annoying sidekick who can be fat, funny, and random. Hi-5 knows how to get out of the app that they are in and the advertisement turns into a premise similar to Disney's Wreck-It Ralph. However, instead of the characters jumping through different video games like in that film, or how in The Lego Movie they travel to different Lego worlds, The Emoji Movie has its characters have an adventure through multiple mobile phone apps to get to their... end destination. Gene's motivation is that he wants to find a hacker who can reprogram him into being a proper "Meh", and only a "Meh". In other words, forcing him to conform to this system that everyone else has been living by for all this time. Gene and Hi-5 wind up in the piracy app because that's where all the naughties are. They stumble across a hacker called "Wyldstyle"... Sorry, I mean... "Jailbreak" who's voiced by Anna Faris. And remember everyone, she is a strong, independent woman who don't need no man. It is imperative that you remember that she is in fact a woman. Look at the fact that she is a woman. You really need to know this she is a woman, *whisper* who don't need no man. She isn't an emoji in The Emoji Movie. She is a strong, independent woman. And women most definitely do not need the help of any living man. The triangle robots show up and chase the trio into Candy Crush, and they proceed to play Candy Crush for something like five minutes. You sit there and you watch the characters play Candy Crush. I'd say this is a product placement and an egregious one at that, but when your movie literally only exists to be a product placement, it's hard to distinguish a difference. The scene is written in such a way that always bugs me in movies. I really hate when characters who have just met start acting like they're best buds, which means that they can conveniently skip the part of character writing where they have to grow and change and come to like each other in the way that real people do. I do realize this is the Emoji Movie we're talking about and they are literally playing Candy Crush. So I really don't know why I'm expecting anything more on this. It's around this time when the B plot gets moving with Gene's "Meh" parents. They decide to leave the emoji messenger app and go looking for their son. This B plot has two purposes. One, for a minor reveal later on that Gene's father is the reason Gene is able to display more than one emotion. His dad had simply learned to suppress his emotions and is now comfortably "Meh". And two, so they have an excuse for these characters to flounder into such apps as Instagram, where they play on the manipulative and predictable family element, and also for attempts at humor which involved these characters literally watching Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen and then a cat video. Interspersed between these scenes are mustache twirling, villainous scenes with Smiler who keeps stressing how important it is that Gene is caught and destroyed: "If they fight about function on the phone, we are all going to be wiped!" and also scenes with Alex, whose phone has been going all glitchy because of the action, chases, and antics that have happened so far in the movie. Because of his phone being so glitchy, Alex makes an appointment with what's effectively an Apple Store so they can reset his phone to fix it, because in this world, these kids find it very difficult to communicate without the use of mobile phones, and more specifically... emojis. This creates the ticking time-bomb element for the characters inside the phone that is necessary, otherwise there will be no urgency whatsoever. "And worlds they go through, you know, your junk mail and your trash mail and they have to deal with, uh... you know-" I'm really not exaggerating when I say the entire film is an advertisement. I'd say about 85% of the scenes with Gene, High-5 and Jailbreak are nothing but product placements. After they wander into Just Dance and play... Just Dance for what feels like an eternity, they have an embarrassing out-of-touch attempt at making a meme with this dance that they call the 'emoji pop' and I cringed so hard I had to close my eyes Hi-5 ends up being sent to the recycle bin because of his own incompetence. "That's why I think people enjoy watching it. Because..." ... This gives Gene and Jailbreak a chance to develop their relationship while they ride a Rihanna song in Spotify. "Welcome to Spotify!" Yes, it really is just as bad as I'm describing. I cannot believe the words that I'm saying. This is actually what happens in the movie. It's here where it's revealed that Jailbreak is actually Princess Emoji who desperately doesn't want to be a damsel in distress who is completely defined by who she's saved by or married to. Subtle, that. Then they go back and rescue Hi-5 from the recycle bin and proceed to a firewall which for some reason needs to have an emoji with a certain face to open it. It's predictably boring and unfunny, Once they get through the firewall, I remember in the theater specifically writing down the line, 'We have to make it to Dropbox!' which is a genuine line in The Emoji Movie, which had me stunned as to what I was actually witnessing. I was floored the entire time that what I was watching is a product that actually exists. Once they go on about how awesome and secure Dropbox is, yep they really do that, they wind up in The Cloud and Gene confesses his love for Jailbreak and she decides to turn him down because she's a strong, independent woman who doesn't need no man. I am not joking. She is quite horrible to him purely because of this film's agenda, not because this character isn't actually interested in him. In fact, it's very clearly shown earlier on that she does actually like him quite a lot. Unfortunately for Gene, right before he confessed his love, Jailbreak had already begun the procedure to turn him into a meh and only a meh. He becomes a meh and doesn't care about anything anymore. I think at this point, Gene gets captured and is taken back to the emoji app, but I... I can't really remember. At this point, my pounding headache was so bad I was struggling to keep up. I remember earlier on in the film there was a joke about princesses being able to summon birds by whistling, which I thought was random, but the payoff to that joke is that Jailbreak whistles for a bird and then Twitter shows up and they fly it back to save Gene. They literally fly... Twitter. Why didn't you just lead with that? So they could have just flown to the end of the movie and we didn't have to watch any of this. The final sequence goes through the motions so hard, you already know exactly what's going to happen before you even see the movie. But in case you couldn't guess, they managed to stop Smiler by crushing her with a robot, but don't worry she doesn't die. This is EU. However, at this point Alex has already begun the reset on his phone so they're all going to die. Jailbreak figures out that they have just enough time to send one last message to try and convince Alex to not reset his phone. They use that stupid, contrived emoji machine to scan Gene one last time, who's gotten over the fact that he was reprogrammed now because he's so unique and different. And remember to be yourself, kids. The machine scans Gene and they have just enough time to send Alex a animated super emoji. There's not just one emoji. It's an emoji that changes into lots of different emotions, that somehow convinces Alex to stop his phone from resetting and he forwards on the super emoji to the girl he wants to go to the dance with. She is so impressed by the super emoji that she comes over to him and says, and she really says this in the movie, I wrote it down as it happened, this is a line of dialogue, 'I like that you're one of those guys who can express his feelings'. ... No, I am not kidding. And then she agrees to go to the dance with him because that super emoji was just so fucking epic. This is so bad that it has to be intentional. It makes the entire movie feel even more pointless than it already is, and it's the last 'fuck you' before it ends. Actually hang on, like, there is one last 'fuck you'. So because all the emojis are saved, they proceed to all do the 'emoji pop' dance I mentioned earlier. You know, it wouldn't be a terrible animated movie if it didn't end with a- a musical number, where they're desperately trying to make a meme. This is embarrassing. By this point, my head was in my hands. Once The Emoji Movie was over, I heard the chavvy family, who are arguing in the intro, with a poor old lady they'd stolen seats from, ask each other, 'so what did you think?' which the man replied, 'I thought it was really good'. I hardly had the energy to stand up, so I just sat there and let the credits wash over me. And you know what? I haven't even mentioned the jokes. That pad out most of this movie. Whatever the most expected and predictable punchline would be, The Emoji Movie rolls with it. "What happened?" "I know. It was an accident. We all have accidents." "You're so soft, Poop." "Not too soft, I hope." Two different characters literally say out loud, 'hashtag truth' and 'hashtag blessed'. That is the level we are talking about. I made a tally of how many times I laughed and roughly how many times the audience laughed. I didn't laugh a single time during The Emoji Movie and the audience laughed seven times by the end of it. All of which were laughs from the adults in the audience too, which I thought was interesting. There was a kid next to me who just started singing out of nowhere. Not singing along to the movie, he was just sort of singing to himself. I think he was bored. The only thing I have to really commend are the poor animators that worked their asses off to make this restricting, poorly written idea as visually interesting and slick as possible. And they honestly did a decent job. They're the only aspect that resembles what actually makes a movie, a movie. The variety of character models, environments, and designs gave them enough to work with to, at the very least, make the visual presentation bearable. Despite this film having quite a low budget for an animated movie, it didn't quite have the same cheap vibe the Illumination films seem to have. While there is absolutely nothing funny about the writing, there's plenty to appreciate in terms of the animation. I noticed some half-decent sight gags in the animation for Hi-5 specifically was consistently quite enjoyable. I know for a fact that the studio does have talent because the animation on Hotel Transylvania and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is pretty wonderful and energetic. In fact, there was a short that played before The Emoji Movie about a puppy in Hotel Transylvania, and that was infinitely more entertaining on just about every level than the film Itself. I'm not saying this film is necessarily worthwhile for the animation aspect. I'm simply showing appreciation for the hard work that was put into storyboarding and animating this horribly flawed advertisement. The Emoji Movie is the worst thing in the history of anything ever. It is the most out of touch, obnoxious, insulting piece of shit that expects so little out of its audience that they might as well have had Gene continuously, directly say to the camera, 'Thanks for the fat paycheck you fucking morons and remember to download Dropbox and Just Dance. Fuck you, idiot.' I mentioned Gene is voiced by T.J. Miller, a comedian I personally don't find particularly funny, However, surprisingly enough, I actually thought his performance was considerably better than almost everyone else. Of course the writing and material was 'hashtag fucking awful', but there was the occasional glimpse of Miller at the very least trying his absolute best. On the Red Carpet or, I guess, Emoji Carpet, he was interviewed saying, ''My big thing was, it's getting made either way, so let us get involved in trying to elevate it and make it something really special and it is." "Lots of giggles. Lots of giggles." "Some tears, and uh, some great ideology and values about women having limitless potential." This reasoning would only hold water if what he said was even remotely true, which it obviously isn't because this film sucks. If he'd just stayed quiet about this project and quietly accepted his paycheck, I don't think anyone would have really cared, but after his Twitter ramblings where he said he was going to commit suicide, but quickly deleted it and called it a 'doxxing of the haters'? Okay, you do realize you were in The Emoji Movie, right? Like, to be a comedian you need to have a certain level of self-awareness. You seriously cannot genuinely be upset that The Emoji Movie is rightfully being hated. High-5 is voiced by James Corden and is one of the most unlikable and irritating characters I've seen in an animated movie since Ben from Treasure Planet and I like Treasure Planet. Let alone, the actual lines of dialogue being obnoxious enough. Attaching James Corden who delivers these lines as if he was on the phone to his boring grandmother only brings it down further. "I wanna say Lupita, but that doesn't feel right now I'm saying it out loud." He even failed to enunciate certain words to such a degree that he wound up sounding like he was saying 'fuck' on two different occasions in the movie. Maybe this was intentional once, but that seems like a strange decision for a kids movie. I wish I had the clip to show you, but I don't. You have to take my word for it. He fills the role of the fat, annoying sidekick- *COUGH* Ahem... Ugggghhhhh- He fills the role of the fat, annoying sidekick who holds everyone back and has to incessantly be funny or random for the kids to constantly gawk at. Jailbreak bugs me the most because of how poorly implemented the feminist angle is. "So when they see it and they see the progressive, like, feminist messages, the messages about being yourself." I was half-expecting her to turn out to be a political lesbian at the end, and I wouldn't have been surprised. With overbearing lines that seemingly come out of nowhere such as 'Women are always inventing stuff men take credit for'. Why did they think it would be a good idea to make the message of the emoji movie be about women having limitless potential? Last time I checked, the thing that matters is that everyone has limitless potential, no matter who they are, and making an issue out of something that by all accounts is arguably not even a problem makes your film about emojis that much more hateable. It really shows how out of touch they are. Not only are they making a movie about emojis, but they're making the point of the movie a feminist message. Do they not understand the internet at all? For an advertisement that's supposed to be about expressing yourself and making sure you're a unique individual who doesn't conform to what society is expecting from you, you sure are conforming your advertisement to fit a narrative that a lot of people consider to be completely unnecessary for the sake of pandering to a small demographic of social justice warriors. Once I saw the credits and I saw Poo with his own special credit as Sir Patrick Stewart It made me question why on Earth, other than money or a favor, he agreed to play a literal piece of shit. In his Emoji Carpet interview, he literally says that he was cast as a joke. "Casting me was in itself a joke." So I guess what it comes down to is that he could literally not give less of a shit. Oh, I just did a thing. "Uhhhh... Representing a movie that there's so much interest and anticipation of and playing a role that I think I've been preparing to play most of my life." Before we wrap up, I feel like it's necessary to comment on the meme-ey nature of the Emoji Movie. From the second a trailer was shown, it was memed Into absolute oblivion; it still continues to this day. And while there isn't a problem with turning something so fucking awful into a very intentional meme, what I truly fear is the out-of-touch bigwig Hollywood fat cats actually turning this into an intentional advertising strategy. Movies like The Boss Baby and The Emoji Movie almost have this element of intentional terribleness because they just know people will talk about it more if it's memeable than if it's just mediocre or forgettable. You just wait until one day we get The Meme Movie in the future. I'd like to see how the Internet reacts to that one. Ultimately, my point is just please do not support this movie. Meme it all you want, but do not pay money to ironically see it like I did. I only paid money so you don't have to. There are plenty of films that have work, passion, ideas, and heart poured into, who actually deserve your money, as opposed to seeing insulting garbage like this. The absolute fool that this film takes you for through its awful, shallow themes and predictable, lazy writing is the real problem. I wouldn't be as angry if they just at least attempted to tell a story. Even if the story was bad, it would still be something. The script is so bad at points that one of the lines towards the end was quite literally, 'I was wrong Gene. I should have believed you all along.' They must have written this in an afternoon. I absolutely despise how clever it thinks it is. No, it's not clever to have Sir Patrick Stewart play a piece of shit and make shit jokes. It's just crass. No, it's not clever to think you're breaking new ground with this ham-fisted feminist slong. Films like Shrek way back in 2001, which yes, I know it was a meme now, but subtly did this idea much more effectively over a decade ago, because guess what? That was a film that was made because someone had an idea first and it was a product second. Not the other way 'round. Perhaps there were plenty of people along the line in production who did have genuinely good intentions, but the whole did not end up being greater than the sum of its parts. The filmmaking is too depressing, cynical, corporate, and nihilistic to give it the benefit of the doubt. The Emoji Movie shows these strange flashes of self-awareness at times, clearly alluding to the fact that whoever wrote this knows how fucking awful it is. Almost as to point the finger at itself so it can laugh along with the audience at how ridiculous the entire premise is. The boards of people who sat around a table, planning the huge amount of money something this thoughtless would make, should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. And I'm more than glad that this atrocious garbage has been shunned and memed by just about everyone. All hope isn't quite lost. Not yet, anyway. Despite the fact that The Emoji Movie has to exist and the fact that is actually doing quite well at the Box Office so nothing I say means anything. So go fucking enjoy it. Do whatever you want. Fuck you. Fuck this movie. Fuck everything.
