When I sat down to watch The Emoji Movie on Saturday afternoon, a small voice in the back of my mind told me that maybe, just maybe, it might be good.
Ten minutes later, that little voice had been brutally suffocated by the overwhelming, vomit-inducing cesspit of a film that is The Emoji Movie.
The movie follows a malfunctioning, divergent “meh” emoji on a journey of self actualization through a high school freshman’s phone.
Yes, that’s really the plot.
The meh emoji, named Gene (T.J. Miller), along with a hacker emoji — yep — and a high five emoji, bounce from app to app in an attempt to reach “the cloud,” an ethereal wonderland, so that the emoji can be reprogrammed or something and save the rest of the phone from deletion or something.
Really, the plot isn’t that important. It’s clear that the only important thing to the writers of this movie was product placement.
There’s a nearly 10-minute dance sequence in the Just Dance app. There’s a random five minute Candy Crush scene. There’s a pointless journey on sound waves in Spotify. There’s even a romantic scene between the meh emoji’s parents in Instagram.
In the rare moments without product placement, the movie pushes a nauseating “be yourself” narrative — despite also making it clear that the malfunctioning emoji is an inconvenience to everyone.
Scenes are cut awkwardly short to make way for more product placement. There were times where I caught myself laughing at the awkward, abrupt fadeouts and transitions between scenes. The whole movie feels like a cobbled-together mess of tech propaganda with a feel-good narrative shoved in just to get the plot from point A to point B.
Also, Patrick Stewart voiced a living pile of feces, and every line he said was a poop joke.
It took all of my strength not to get out and run screaming from the near-empty theatre. Every outdated and cringe-worthy joke, every 2013 pop culture reference, every single line of stupid and blithering dialogue chipped away at my very soul throughout the movie.
Part of me hoped, right until the bitter end, that this movie would be good in some regard — or at least so terrible that there was humor in it — but there is no novelty, nor anything remotely funny, about the movie. If anything, it’s just boring.
It’s a pandering, product placement-filled mess. Watching The Emoji Movie is like stubbing your toe. There’s no humor in it. It just hurts.
This movie affirmed for me that there is a hell — and we’re living in it.
Rating: 0/5
