Login
Is the first animated Razzie Award winner The Emoji Movie the worst film of the year? Gene (T.J. Miller) is a ‘meh’ emoji inside a kid’s iPhone who wants to be a wide variety of expressions. Once he accidentally glitches the phone, he crosses the threshold and exits Textropolis with his band of misfits Hi-5 (James Corden) and Jailbreak (Anna Faris), going through all sorts of Apps like CandyCrush, Just Dance, Spotify, and Dropbox, to escape from the bots hired by Smiler (Maya Rudolph). The obvious message in the film is that technology connects people together, so buy an iPhone and text an emoji to show your love for another. Hearing that flimsy and gimmicky moral, I saw The Emoji Movie as a 90-minute commercial for Sony products, with all the features installed such as a half-baked story, uninspired characters, and obnoxious puns, but colorful imaginative worlds. As for Alex, the phone’s owner who sends a text to let go of his comfort zone, he is no Riley from Inside Out. The boy is just as dreadfully boring as all the other phone-ridden schoolmates, including his girl crush, and the apps and emojis don’t do much to support his character arc. Also, the film missed an opportunity to have the emojis escape the phone world and enter the WiFi network, where they might accidentally damage the system causing chaos in not just the school but the world. This could have been a unique children’s satire tackling the impact of technology among humans. However, The Emoji Movie and Sony exist to only advertise trendy electronics rather than glorifying the art of cinema.
(1 ½ Thumbs Down Symbols out of 5)
