I don’t think that anybody ever expected The Emoji Movie to be any good. It’s as shameless a corporate product as has ever existed, has no inherent wealth as an intellectual property and is nothing that anybody ever cared to see given the feature film treatment. They’re little pictures on your phone that you sometimes use in place of words. That’s it.
It’s not that we’ve never been surprised before by a movie that, on its surface, should have been a terrible idea. By all rights, Trolls should have been awful, but a talented creative team and a shockingly well written screenplay made that into a genuine good time at the movie theater. And it’s not like Sony hasn’t made good kids movies before. Between Arthur Christmas, Goosebumps and Hotel Transylvania, their track record is as good as anybody else’s in the business.
The problem is that this is the perfect storm of bad idea and corporate cynicism to produce the kind of once-in-a-lifetime stinkers like Dungeons & Dragons. This movie had everything working against it, and its one selling point seemed to be that Patrick Stewart was playing the Poop Emoji. I love Stewart’s against-the-grain comedy antics as much as anybody — with his run on American Dad being, in my mind, one of the all-time best cartoon supporting roles — but that shouldn’t be your core hook for a ninety-minute feature.
As critics attend press screenings ahead of its weekend premiere, their reviews are starting to trickle in down the pipeline. And coming from somebody who expected this movie to be savaged to the bone, even I’m awestruck by just how visceral — just how personally — these reviews are getting.
Scrolling through the critics’ reviews on Rotten Tomatoes for this movie is momentously satisfying. Seriously, give it a try. It’s doubtlessly more entertaining than the movie itself will be and it won’t cost you $10 a head in admission.
New York critic Emily Yoshida called it “one of the darkest, most dismaying films I have ever seen, much less one ostensibly made for children.” The Wrap writer Alonso Duralde opined that it “lacks humor, wit, ideas, visual style, compelling performances, a point of view or any other distinguishing characteristic that would make it anything but a complete waste of your time.”
Others, like Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson, seemed to be blindsided by its sheer, audacious terribleness. She comments that “looking back, it seems so obvious. We should have seen The Emoji Movie’s utter awfulness coming. But as with so many other things in 2017, hindsight is not so much 20/20 as a giant regret generator.”
IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wasn’t nearly so surprised, however, stating that “The Emoji Movie is almost as bad and brutally depressing as everything else in 2017.” For context, this puts it on par with George A. Romero‘s unexpected departure, among others.
Metro critic Matt Prigge recalled the classic Simpsons episode “The Itchie & Scratchy & Poochie Show,” where greedy corporate number crunchers decide to update their waningly popular Tom & Jerry ripoff by adding a new character, Poochie: a shamelessly trend-chasing, Mary Sue-type character that screamed of middle-aged men trying to figure out what kids thought was cool. Her review simply states that The Emoji Movie is “the Poochie of movies.”
While I would have been content with skipping out on this one before, I feel almost obligated to see it now, if only to provide the necessary context for these God awful reviews. Then again, maybe it’s simply best to leave well enough alone.
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