Movie Review: By block and brick, ‘The LEGO Movie’ is in top form

Why would you want to watch 100 minutes of a movie that’s essentially propaganda for a toy company?

Because “The LEGO Movie: The Piece of Resistance” transcends all the TVC pablum and promotional hoopla to establish itself as the funniest and most enjoyable animated comedy of 2014 thus far. Plus, it does all that with a G rating. How cool is that?

We begin in the LEGO city of Bricksburg where an ordinary mini-figure named Emmet (Chris Pratt) works at a construction site and has never met an instruction manual he didn’t like. He follows all the rules, finding joy in the first overpriced coffee of the day, and even trusts his manual on matters of friendship.  




When his manual flutters back to the construction site after hours, Emmet bumps into the beautiful and mysterious Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) who mistakes him to be The Special, the greatest Master Builder ever, and the savior of the LEGO universe.

Actually, he fell down and got stuck with the legendary block called the Piece of Resistance.

But anyway...enamored by Wyldstyle (she’s not a DJ, by the way) Emmet lets himself be dragged off and away from his city to the Old West world. There, he meets the blind old wizard Vitruvius (Morgan Fereman), and thence is taken to even more of the LEGO worlds that he never knew existed.

There are many amazing things here for the LEGO-nerds of yore and even the LEGO-crazed of the post-noughties generation (read: kids of LEGO fans) but at the heart of this is a Fool’s journey narrative that anyone can enjoy, even those who’ve never handled a LEGO brick in their lives.

That said, those who do have any nostalgia for their days spent consumed by assembly and exquisite frustration with their blocks and bricks (like me) will definitely get their kicks and inside jokes, guaranteed. Because of that, I urge fans right off the bat to plunk down the extra money and see this one in 3D. Trust me, it’s worth it.  

This one is constructed much like other fantasy and sci-fi epics in the vein of LOTR, “Star Wars” or probably more apt, “The Matrix.” Unlikely, nondescript underdog rises to become world savior? Check. Revelation that the world is bigger and darker than expected? Check. Motley fellowship of rebels against an evil government/institution? Check.  

As Emmet the Construction Guy has veil after veil ripped from his eyes by each Master Builder, he discovers that there are more worlds beyond his own little corner of Bricksburg and even more fantastical ones after his initial foray into the Old West LEGO world.   



Eventually it’s revealed to Emmet that Bricksburg and the other LEGO worlds are held under the tyrannical foot of the evil Lord Business, a despot bent on destroying the LEGO universe on “Taco Tuesday” and recreating it in the ordered and unimaginative image he that he sees fit.

How? By gluing everything together through the lethal weapon known as The Kragle. Only the Piece of Resistance used by The Special can stop Lord Business from fulfilling his plans of neatly-ordered bricks and blocks.

A lot of the comedic momentum and flavor is due to Chris Pratt’s voice as Emmet, incredibly entertaining and easy to root for as the underdog who is thrust into a role that requires gravitas and a reliance on your own abilities.

Who knew Emmet’s skill for following instructions to the letter would make him the messianic liberator of all things brick and block? His performance here just makes me excited to see him in Marvel's "Guardians of the Galaxy." No doubt this guy is blossoming into a real Hollywood A-lister from his humble beginnings as Andy Dwyer in “Parks and Recreation.”  



There’s a great ensemble cast of heroes that make up Emmet’s companions, too, including Batman (Will Arnett), Uni-Kitty (Alison Brie), Benny (Charlie Day), and the phenomenally caricaturish pirate named Metalbeard (Nick Offerman), but for me it’s really the villains that make this one hilarious.

Will Ferrel, as the voice of the order-obsessed Lord Business, is a mix of Dr. Evil and Emperor Palpatine if they had a penchant for wearing platform boots to defy Ace Frehley with humor both cruel and black. His deadly Micro-Manager machines are also aptly named, as they attack and arrange everything according to Lord Business’s wishes.

My fave character, though, is voiced by Liam Neeson: Good/Bad Cop, the schizoid two-headed figure with an Irish police attitude that eventually provides the plot fulcrum in one of the later scenes. Neeson not only hits us with his trademark “Taken” voice of intimidation for Bad Cop, he also provides a giddy kind of cloying “niceness” with the Good Cop. Both Cops fear Lord Business, but neither are afraid of anything else. What happens when Good Cop’s moral misgivings are tested to its limits? Which Cop wins?



The two parties vying for supremacy over the LEGO worlds couldn’t be clearer: Lord Business and Good/Bad Cop represent the force of order, straight lines, and always following instructions; the other side is made up of the Master Builders who represent imagination, freeform vision and seeing exciting ways to craft the blocks without the aid of any manual.

The look and texture of the movie is pretty awesome, too. There’s a palpable tactility to the bricks and the way the characters move. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” “21 Jump Street”) spent a fair amount of R&D working on the scuffs and fingerprint smudges of the blocks, trying to achieve a realistic amount of variation and irregularity.

The physical limitations of the LEGO mini-figures is their charm, the filmmakers thought. So, to execute their ambition, they turned to Chris McKay (“Robot Chicken”) as animation co-director. Boy, did this guy bring great aesthetic difference.



Visually, they achieved a photo-real, non-traditional computer animation style resembling stop-motion, which gave their characters and landscapes the homemade aesthetic they liked. Rather than seamless CGI backgrounds and drawn bricks, the animators created each individual component and virtually built every scene brick by brick. Thus, the characters moved and interacted authentically. Even in their expressions, the guideline was not to stray from the standard mini-figure palette: flat painted eyes, brows, and mouths.

Which is to say: you’ve never seen anything like the “LEGO Movie” thus far in animated movie history.

It’s a blend of old skool techniques and filmmaking tech made possible only in the last five years (including 3D, IMAX, and photo-real texturing), harried and organically fused into a marriage whose results are eye-popping and jaw-dropping. Wait `til you see the stormy LEGO sea, the waves cresting and breaking and STILL looking like moving bricks. The attention to detail is just...wow.  

But no way is this movie perfect. The jokes often disguise the fact that the segue to each revelation is prickly and could be smoother, plus there’s a twist at the end that, intuitively, makes sense but won’t work for everyone—it’ll be panned by those who eschew Hollywood’s proclivity for sappiness, and rightly so. As far as it goes, though, none of this takes away from a compelling story.

How many times in your life have you rooted for a minifigure with claw hands, anyway? The novelty of it and all the innovative things the filmmakers brought to the table outweigh any minor lapses the script has.



It does, however, set such a high bar that we’ll expect much more from the sequel.  

As a last caveat, the theme song “Everything Is Awesome” (whose full version is by Tegan and Sara, with The Lonely Island) was designed to make the citizens of Bricksburg calm, happy, and firmly under mental heel under Lord Business, but it will be stuck to your head like Krazy Glue and on LSS repeat for days after you view the movie.

Then again, the spirited tune mirrors the movie: awesome and splendid. Bravo, LEGO. Bravo, Lord and Miller.

The LEGO Movie opened in 3D and 2D cinemas across the country on February 6. — VC, GMA News


KARL R. De MESA is the author of “Report from the Abyss” and the upcoming non-fic collection “Radiant Void – Pop Signals and Notes on the Culture of the Human Spirit.”