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The Emoji Movie 猸愶笍

In a schoolboy’s phone live hundreds of walking, talking, smiling (or not smiling) emojis. A young ‘meh’ emoji called Gene (TJ Miller) discovers that he has the power to not just be ambivalent about everything: he can smile and love and cry and, essentially, be many emojis at once. In other words, that he’s – shudder – a malfunction. To fix this, he joins forces with the high five emoji called, um, Hi-5 (James Corden) and a hacker emoji called Jailbreak (Anna Faris) and journeys towards the Dropbox app. Also in this movie: Sir Patrick Stewart as The Poop Emoji.

Pros:

• This film is aimed squarely at six-year-olds, and it will make them happy. The humour, the tone, the… everything is very ‘route one’, with most of the jokes puns on what the emojis represent: the elephant emoji has a good memory, et cetera. It’s simple, it’s mindless, it’s a film about emojis. There’s not a lot to it, and if you want a kids’ movie with not a lot to it, well… here’s The Emoji Movie.
• There’s a nice bit where our emoji trio end up in the Spotify app, and ride boats along the ‘waves’ of the music. A digital whale leaps over the waves at one point, and it looks nice. Likewise, the Just Dance app sequence is… vibrant. Loud and bouncy and goofy and, yes, obviously clunky product placement. See also: YouTube, Instagram and Candy Crush, all of which cameo in this film.
• It’s a tight 86 minutes.

Cons:

• Sad to say, but The Emoji Movie doesn’t have anything to it. It’s a soulless, mechanical cash-in. Everyone loves emojis! Let’s make an emoji movie! Sure, the idea of emojis having character arcs and desires and fears and everything else makes no sense but just make the movie! It’s easy to be cynical about a movie this cynical. Compare it to the likes of Toy Story or Inside Out and it’s truly appalling. If you’re looking for a cheap way to keep young ‘uns entertained for an hour and a half it’s... a thing that might do that. It does make The Angry Birds movie seem like Citizen Kane, however, so maybe that’s a good thing.
• It’s desperately uninventive (which is another way of saying the first ‘pro’ on my list, but let’s ignore that).
• It’s 86 minutes long.

Three word review: Meh meh meh.