They say that Hollywood can make a movie based on everything. With help from some good writers and a talented director, they can bring a product we wouldn't dream of being in a movie to life and leave an influence on future movies. Where a movie like "The Lego Movie" does it right, a movie like "The Emoji Movie" does not. In fact, the latter doesn't do it right at all. It fails on every single level imaginable resulting in one of the worst animated movies I've ever seen in my entire life with a cliched story, uncreative animation, and characters so annoying and unlikeable that at times you might actually get drawn to your own smartphone. If you want further proof that this movie is awful, here's the cliched premise I was talking about.
On the smartphone of a high school student named Alex (Jake T. Austin), an entire urban city filled with "the most important form of communication ever invented" (that is exactly what the film said, I am not kidding), emojis. Each one has a specific personality and has to act a certain way. However, a meh emoji named Gene (T.J. Miller) exhibits multiple personalities and is considered an outcast by the other emojis. Gee, where have I seen that before? After causing chaos, he is hunted down by evil bots headed by Smiler (Maya Rudolph in yet another awful animated movie) and runs into a hand emoji named Hi-5 who along with a hacker emoji named Jailbreak (Anna Faris) attempt to leave the phone and try to get to the Cloud. Along the way, they go through multiple apps just there to get some product placement in while trying to avoid the evil Smiler. There's also some subplots involving Gene's parents (Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge) getting separated along with Alex having trouble expressing his feelings to a girl he likes, but considering that I already lost some sanity watching this awful movie, I'd rather move on.
After I saw the abomination that was last years "Norm of the North", I thought that there would be no animated movie that could possibly be worse, that is until I saw this. It's not only really bad, but it's also unbearable. The thing I hate most about this awful movie is how much money the film wasted. It apparently cost fifty million dollars to make this movie and just thinking about it makes me enraged. Imagine what you could have done with that money rather than make this garbage. You could have built a homeless shelter in every single state in America or you could have given it to the poor so they won't go to bed hungry. But no, Sony Pictures Animation just had to waste it on a movie so awful that it might have given me brain damage. The story is nothing but cliches. Every single plot point had already been done and the film decided to steal the creativity from great animated movies like "Wreck-It Ralph", "The Lego Movie" and "Inside Out". Not only that, but most of the film is just devoted to product placement which I'll just say is some of the worst in film history. I'm not joking when I say that it plays apps like Instagram, Candy Crush Saga, Twitter, Facebook, Just Dance, YouTube, Spotify and especially Dropbox have integral plot points to this film. Even the ending to this movie, which I won't spoil, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The animation is also highly uncreative. While it's not bad, it looks absolutely unimaginative and has no creativity put into it. Every single world that is shown in this movie has been shown better in other films. I honestly can't blame the animators for this as these poor people are being treated like paper by their terrible and stupid managers as was revealed in a leaked letter from 2014. As for the characters, well, what do you think? They're bland, cliched, extremely unfunny and have phoned in voice performances from its actors. I honestly have no idea why any of these actors accepted this movie. My only guess is that they were blackmailed into doing it by Sony. Then again, I don't blame them for not putting any effort into this.
"The Emoji Movie" is one of, if not the worst animated movie released so far this decade. I hated every single thing about this movie. It's an absolute insult to the animation genre as a whole and has no reason to exist on this planet at all. I really hope the Razzies consider this movie for Worst Picture because if there's anything this film will be remembered for, is as the movie that was made just to cash in on a fad. Let's hope that Hollywood will learn its lesson with this film, just because you can make a movie based on anything, doesn't mean you should.
