The Lego Movie

The writing and directing team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller have pulled off a small miracle with The Lego Movie.  Not only have they made the most imaginative animated film since the heyday of Pixar, but they have also given us a film that is truly funny (even hilarious at times), inventive, heartfelt, and smart enough that any audience of just about any age can enjoy it.  All this from a product placement film based around plastic toys.  This is the first great movie of 2014, and yes, I'm just as surprised as you are.

But, if you look at the track record of Lord and Miller, maybe it's not so surprising.  These two guys seem to have a talent for taking ideas that should be awful and generic, yet they always wind up digging beneath the surface, and striking gold.  After all, these are the guys who took a late 80s TV drama that nobody remembers like 21 Jump Street, and turned it into a wonderfully daft comedy. (The upcoming sequel to that film that they're currently working on is one of my more anticipated films of the summer.) With The Lego Movie, the team gives us everything that we expect from the film, but done in a smarter way than we would initially think.  For example, the movie gives us jokes that fly fast and furious, plenty of pop culture references, rapid-paced action sequences that look tailor made to be in a video game, and plenty of scenes and characters based on real Lego playsets that kids will likely want to buy after the movie is over so they can recreate what they watched.  All of this is expected, and is done very well, especially the action sequences, which eclipse some live action efforts.

But it's the stuff we don't expect that the filmmakers have thrown in that grabs our attention.  While the plot may be cliched and familiar, the movie knows this, and does a wonderful job satirizing just about every element of a "chosen one" plot.  You know what a "chosen one" plot is.  It's the plot where a seemingly ordinary person is suddenly thrust in the middle of an epic battle for survival, and a wise old mentor tells said ordinary person that he is the "chosen one" who will unite the world, and bring down the tyrant who is currently bringing the land to the brink of doom.  We would expect the movie to just play by the rules of this plot, because hey, it's a family film, and maybe the kids in the audience are seeing this stuff for the first time.  Instead, the movie plays it smart, and actually acknowledges that we've seen this stuff before.  The jokes that the script plays on its own plot are inventive, and most importantly, hilarious.  The Lego Movie is in the tradition of the classic Zucker Brothers comedies (Airplane!, The Naked Gun), in which no movie cliche or convention is safe from ridicule, and visual jokes pretty much fill every corner of the screen.

So, who is the "chosen one" of this story?  That would be Emmett (voiced by Chris Pratt), an entirely ordinary little plastic construction worker who lives in a society of conformity and massive consumerism, and likes it that way.  There is absolutely nothing special or unique about Emmett.  He follows the rules, does what everybody else does, and has never had an original thought in his entire life, although he does one day dream of building a quite impractical double-decker couch, so more people could watch TV at once.  But hey, why should Emmett be any different from the other Lego people who inhabit his city, since they don't really do any thinking either?  One day, while staying after hours at his job, Emmett discovers a mysterious hole that leads him to a vast underworld, where he comes across the wise mentor, Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman, wonderfully spoofing just about every "wise old man" performance he's ever done), who is aided by the required "tough girl" of the film, Wildstyle (Elizabeth Banks), in his fight against evil.

Vitruvius and Wildstyle instantly mistake Emmett for "The Special" - a "master builder" with great imagination who can construct just about anything.  The reason for the mistake is that while Emmett was tumbling down that hole, he came across a simple block known as the Piece of Resistance, which is fabled to bring down the evil tyrant who is currently threatening the Lego world.  The tyrant in question is none other than President Business (Will Ferrell), who rules over Emmett's city and makes sure everyone stays in line and doesn't do any thinking for themselves.  What Emmett doesn't know is that President Business is also the evil supervillain, Lord Business, who is planning to wipe out not just Emmett's world, but all the other different Lego worlds (made up of pirates, knights, spacemen, etc.) with a secret weapon he is developing, and rebuild them to his liking.

Emmett's mission to save the world and unlock his inner creativity so that he can become a master builder will take him across many themed worlds, like the Old West, and a magical happy place ruled over by the extremely cute Unikitty (Alison Brie), a cat crossed with a unicorn.  He also picks up some allies in his battle along the way, all of which are based on licensed Lego toys, such as Batman (Will Arnett), who we learn is not only Wildstyle's boyfriend, but also has a penchant for composing emo indie rock songs about darkness.  I wouldn't dream of spoiling some of the other cameos who show up during the course of the film.  I also loved President Business' main henchman, the split-personality Good Cop/Bad Cop, whose face swivels around to reveal whatever mood he's in, and is hilariously voiced by Liam Neeson.  This is a movie filled with so many big laughs and surprises that adults just may find themselves going back to the theater for a second viewing - this time without the kids.

But what really sets The Lego Movie apart from the countless previous efforts to adapt toys into feature films (Transformers, G.I. Joe, Battleship) is not just the smart humor, but that it actually is about something.  I'm going to be very vague here, but the final moments of the movie take some very unexpected and surprisingly heartwarming turns.  Yes, there is the big battle between good and evil, but the last half hour also opens up into a touching side climax that we weren't expecting, but makes all the more sense the more we think back on the film.  Lord and Miller put a lot of thought into their script, and it really shows during these moments.  That's ultimately what pushes this movie up from being good, and makes it great.  They could have easily have just made a funny movie about these plastic figures (and they have), but they also make us care about what we are watching.

Here is a movie that could have gone wrong in so many ways, yet it manages to not only be better than we expect, it also manages to go even further.  The Lego Movie surpasses all expectations, and really does deserve the title of being a small cinematic miracle.  I can't wait to see this movie again.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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