The Emoji Movie (Who Cares)

[Ivan Drago]

[Ivan Drago]

The things I do to get on the roster of writers for a movie review website.

Will post the link to my thoughts when its up.

[Henry Gale]

The things I do to get on the roster of writers for a movie review website.

Will post the link to my thoughts when its up.

Can't wait!

But I will say I feel very weird that the clips I've seen for this (mainly of the opening scene) made me, I dunno, not find it entirely horrible? The gag of the crying emoji winning the lottery, and yelling "Oh great! I'm a millionaire!" while he's uncontrollably sobbing, the laughing emoji ecstatic that he just broke his arm and could see the bone, and Meh accidentally bumping into emoticons, with walkers and wheelchairs, referred to as the elderly; those all made me have that feeling where I'm perked up to almost laugh, but not quite? You know? Like almost real comedy? Though I will say Patrick Stewart's Poo and his son proudly chanting "We're Number 2!" as they leave a bathroom stall is just the sort of market-tested-absurdism that somehow did manage to make me actually laugh. Like look, I'm sitting there watching clips for a movie with the title "The Emoji Movie", the expectation bar is very low and all I am expecting is bad puns and cute-at-best jokes. I definitely didn't get more than that.

I do assume the movie plunges way worse depths of awful, but with those clips that the studio was obviously happy enough with to spread around in promotional materials, it made its best attempt to convince me maybe it wasn't the cinematic antichrist, and made me almost feel Mike White's influence in that sort of dialogue.