The Emoji Movie

The Emoji Movie. 

The only question here is; how bad is it? This was the reason behind me deciding to watch it. And no Emoji Movie, you will not escape from this unharmed.

The Emoji Movie has four plot arcs. There’s the phone owner, Alex trying to win over the girl he likes, then there’s Gene the ‘meh’ emoji and the problems he causes, then Gene’s parents for some reason and whatever they get up to then the villain, a smiley woman who is just some sort of smiley, evil dictator. Every emoji in Textopolis (seriously?) has their own function of being the emoji they are. The crying emoji always cries, the Christmas tree emoji is always a Christmas tree, and the shit emoji is always a piece of shit. Gene is a meh emoji but has trouble being just a meh emoji, because of something to do with his dad and his ‘genes’.  Aha, aha I get it.  So this fucks everything up for Alex when he tries to send an emoji to the girl he likes and ends up sending something else. Because we all know how important emojis are in getting a person to like you. 

Gene decides he needs a hacker to help reprogram him to just be a meh, forcing him to conform to the system that everyone else has been living by. Then he befriends a fat, annoying fucking hand called high-5 who is obviously voiced by James Corden.  Then they end up running through different apps. Just like Inside Out, but with apps. Urgh. They get chased by some triangle robots through Candy Crush and Spotify and stuff then they manage to fly on the Twitter bird to save the day. Yes, the Twitter bird. Then Gene becomes like, a Jesus emoji and creates an animated emoji full of multiple emojis and Alex sends this to the girl, and the girl is super impressed with it so walks over to him and accepts his invitation to the dance. And she actually says this line, “I like that you’re one of those guys who can express his feelings”. Yes, well done Alex. Proof that you don’t actually need to build up the courage to go and physically talk to a girl because you can just send her a fucking emoji instead. This is one last fuck you to the audience having made them sit through this dreadful movie for it all to be a complete waste of time, with no message at the end for the kids that are watching.

The board that sat around a table and came up with the idea of selling this hour and a half advertisement to an audience to make millions of dollars should be completely ashamed of themselves.  And that’s what it is, a load of colourful moving images slapped together under the façade of a movie, a movie where ‘movie’ is a part of the title to let everyone know it is in fact a movie and not just one long fucking advert.

Nothing in this movie was funny in the slightest. I sat throughout the whole thing with an expressionless gaze waiting for something funny to materialise. And the fact that the studio had Sir Patrick Stewart play a piece of shit and make literal shit jokes is all the more insulting to everyone who paid to watch it. Even if you didn’t pay to see this you have a right to be insulted for wasting your precious time and energy. The blatant use of popular music throughout the film is an obvious trap to make the kids think, “Oh yay I love this song this movie is great” and the fact that it is basically a rip off to Inside Out makes it even more evil.

It is out of touch, obnoxious, cynical and will no doubt leave disappointed faces on children. The only good thing about this is that I enjoy seeing children with disappointed faces.