The Emoji Movie

Year: 2017
Genre: Animated Comedy
Directed: Tony Leondis
Stars: T.J. Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris, Maya Rudolph, Steven Wright, Jennifer Coolidge, Patrick Stewart, Christina Aguilera, Sofia Vergara, Rachael Ray, Sean Hayes, Jake T. Austin
Production: Sony Pictures Animation

There's a whole world inside my phone!

Boy what a piece of 💩! There is absolutely no reason for this movie to exist - none. To make a movie about Legos or Transformers or My Little Pony is one thing, but making an entire movie about the text app on your phone is the equivalent of making a movie called The Secret Life of Smoke Signals. The fact that the movie centers on the "😕" emoji is, in a way, kind of ironic. "😕," is quite literally the best thing you can say about this movie. The worst you can say, is it made this reviewer want to 🤢.

The (ugh) Emoji Movie follows a few days in the life of Gene Meh (Miller), an Emoji who for some reason doesn't have the ability to do a "Meh" on cue. As a result of a first day screw up, Gene becomes a social pariah and risks deletion unless he can find a code that will change his programming for the better...I guess. Along for the ride is former user favorite High-Five (Corden), and the mysterious Hacker named Jailbreak (Farris) who isn't who she says she is but her big, third act reveal means little, and does little other than prop up a cynical Twitter ad.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, The Emoji Movie is chalked full of low-hanging fruit when it comes to jokes and basic story elements. But what is surprising is there's so little of anything actually going on. For real though! In between page long exposition dumps, plot contrivance dumps and forced, cringe-worthy youth-oriented vocab dumps, the jokes seem to be spewing at 30% capacity and the plot seems barely alive. It's essentially a movie of surface level dynamics and empty space.

This s**t's on fleek!

What little we have to grab onto in this godforsaken movie is Meh's ambiguously set up heroes journey. A journey that literally takes him, his friends and his family through Facebook, Youtube, Spotify and Dropbox because, you know, what's a movie like this without cat videos, malware updates, bad pop music and "thumbs up" stickers. There's also a trek through Candy Crush which not only feels uninspired but does the unthinkable in taking a beat to actually explain the game lest someone in the audience still holds onto their rotary. It all reaches peak stupidity when Meh manages to travel to "the cloud" thanks largely to his ability to make faces and remember the name of the girl the phone's user is obsessed with.

Literally the best joke in the movie...

The final act makes no sense but trust me, by the point Meh makes his return to Textopolis (no joke, the Emojis live in Textopolis), the movie is so far gone, you'll just be glad it's a few minutes from wrapping up. When it finally does wrap up the only question you'll probably be asking yourself is, "am I angry that I saw this movie, or am I just angry that it wasted my time?"

With a threadbare story and failing significantly to reach already low expectations, The Emoji Movie is arguably the worst movie of the summer. And this is the same summer that brought us the The Mummy (2017) and that's say something! Everything it does has been done before and better, and what it manages to do differently is so cynically implemented and poorly thought out. This isn't a movie, it's a tweet that's grown sentient.

Final Grade: 💩💩💩💩💩