THE EMOJI MOVIE (2017) - We have failed as a human race.

* Warning: This review contains some offensive language and humor. But like the movie totally deserves it. Continue at your own discretion. *

The Emoji Movie is a computer-animated "comedy" "film" directed by Tony Leondis (of Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch fame) and starring T. J. Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris, Maya Rudolph, and Jake T. Austin (remember him from Wizards of Waverly Place?). The "movie" follows our "hero" Ralph Gene, a video game villain emoji who feels the pressure of having to conform to his expected role in the society he lives it. He then escapes and meets up with another misfit who doesn't fit into her world--Vanellope von Schweetz Jailbreak. Together they go on a journey to become who they want to be, only to find themselves forced to clean up the mess they've made when their game phone is labeled as malfunctioning and sentenced to deletion.

yeah this movie is literally Wreck-It-Ralph.

But with emojis.

So this is where we've come to as a human race.

Fuck.

Step aside, Citizen Kane.

The Emoji Movie is the worst thing in the history of anything ever. I'm not even going to make any excuses for this "movie". It looked like absolute garbage when it was announced, and it ended up being absolute garbage when it was released. Sure, The Lego Movie also looked like it would be terrible, but that movie ended up being the best animated movie of the year by a long shot because it was smart, funny, and made with love. This movie screams "cash cow", and was made purely because Hey! Kids love phones! Kids love emojis! Let's make a movie!

But the thing is, your kids probably won't even like it (none of the three kids in my showing did). One of them actually left early. I suppose if you want to entertain your kids then at least they'll be conscious while watching it?? That's the best I can say? It might be entertaining if you have the brain capacity of a 4-year old. AKA if you're actually a fan of Luke Paul or Jake Paul or whatever that faggot's name is.

And now look at how that turned out.

And yes, the movie was really, really bad. It's the movie equivalent of that one shit you take after eating a whole lot of Indian food--the kind that burns your butthole on the way out before flooding the bathroom floor, with the smell causing you to vomit so badly that you literally have excrement, waste, and undigested food coming out of both ends of your body at the same time. That's how bad the movie was.

But before I start talking about the actual movie, let's talk about Sony first. Otherwise known as the worst movie production company we have right now. They've been responsible for such hits as the new feminazi Ghostbusters, the awful Smurfs trilogy, the terrible Passengers, the Angry Birds movie (self-explanatory), and Sausage Party (VERY self-explanatory). My point here is this they make absolutely terrible movies, often times at the expense of some potentially good ones. They were completely planning on making a 3D-animated Popeye the Sailor movie directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, the genius behind Samurai Jack, Dexter's Laboratory, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Batman: The Animated Series! And Sony shut down that movie because they decided they'd rather do a movie about fucking emojis.

If I'm going to be honest with you, I'm actually a bit surprised that Sony didn't have the Angry Birds from the The Angry Birds Movie appear as a cameo in an app in here, and have The Emoji Movie officially start a Phone Cinematic Universe that will also tie into the Fruit Ninja movie and Minecraft movie that are actually in production. That seems like something they would do.

Alex is what all the 40-year old writers
think a regular teen these days is:
socially incompetent and incapable of
human speech beyond emojis.

Okay so the movie. I know I was in for a really bad start when one of the first lines in the movie was "The greatest innovation in communication is the emoji." Oh fuck you, movie. Our main character is Gene, an emoji with more than one emotion who wants to be reprogrammed to be "meh" all the time. We also have his gay best friend Hi-5 who should have been the lovable comic-relief goofball but instead ends up being the most fucking annoying afterthought of a character I've seen in recent history. It's like Sony wanted to be all cool and progressive by inserting in a gay character in a movie that has gay pride undertones, but it doesn't mean anything because he's so irrelevant and annoying that I wanted to rip my eyes out every time I saw him.

Anyway, the master of the phone is Andy Alex, a regular teenaged boy who has a huge boner for Addie but can't talk to her like a regular fucking human being so his unnamed best friend gives him the advice that will change his life forever: "Chill bro, just send her an emoji." Yeah. Because that's how kids these days talk. Alex sends her the "meh" emoji because that's so fucking romantic, and Gene obviously screws up. He and Hi-5 then meet and bond over being mutual losers or whatever and go off to find Jailbreak, a typical tomboy who has no real personality of her own except wanting to be free from social confinements (more on that later). And then they go off on an adventure, hopping from app to app in order to get to Dropbox where Jailbreak can hack into the "source code" and reprogram Gene into being a proper "meh". Yeah because that's how Dropbox works apparently.

Sir Patrick Stewart AKA Prof. Charles Xavier
plays the poop emoji and this might be
the most offensive casting I've ever seen.

The story is so incredibly boring because we've seen it a hundred times before. The "film"makers literally just took a bunch of successful movies from the past decade or so about people who don't fit in and made it into a single movie and pat themselves on the back as if they were so fucking brilliant.

Meanwhile Gene's parents go looking for him and in the middle of it all, their relationship problems come up and they split up. That's an important subplot that the movie dedicates several scenes to. I think their relationship was failing because they don't fully express their feelings to each other, but that's incredibly laughable because being emotionless is literally their fucking purpose for existing. And also, because they're emotionless, they always speak in this slow, monotone voice that gets really annoying after the first 30 seconds.

Oh yeah and also the main villain is this bitch called Smiler who's evil but smiles all the time because she can't help but be constantly happy. It gets really creepy, especially when she starts threatening Gene with an assortment of weapons while smiling (this is a kid's movie, right?) She reminded me of my Gen Chem professor in Freshman year. She sends a bunch of evil robots to destroy Gene afterwards and I think she dies at the end but really who cares.

The jokes are so unfunny in this movie that I did not smile a single time. I was in a 100-seat auditorium (Movies 16 clearly overestimated the success of this movie) and there were probably about six seats filled, most of them very young children. And I did not hear a single laugh. Not once. All the jokes are on such a base-level humor that I honestly couldn't believe a team of professional writers were paid to write this stuff. You get jokes on the level of "Wow, Poop! You're so soft," and a clock emoji going "Hey stop staring at the time. My eyes are up here!" and "I'm not tea. I'm coffee!" (Don't know how that one was supposed to be funny, but the movie really made it seem like you were supposed to be on the floor dying of laughter)

Okay, I'm sorry but if you honestly think the eggplant is not
a popular emoji in 2017 you are sorely mistaken.

But undoubtedly one of the worst aspects of the movie is how the "film"makers don't really seem to know how teenagers actually act. All the "funny" references are so incredibly dated, with stuff like "Bye, Felicia", Candy Crush, even Facebook (just FYI, Sony, no teenager goes on Facebook anymore). There are also extensive references to Spotify, Instagram, Just Dance, and... YouTube.

I cringed so hard when they went into YouTube and the Pen Pineapple Apple Pen video was playing. As if it wasn't already old. And it played for a whole minute. 60. Whole. Seconds. And the first ten seconds, it literally dominated the entire movie screen. Yeah fuck you, movie.

Because people still play this.

I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but I think the movie would have benefited from referencing things like fidgets spinners or even dabbing because at least those cancerous pieces of pop culture are still relevant in 2017.

Oh God, I cannot believe I just wrote that. Now you know how bad this movie is.

The pop song that they use at the end (seemingly a requirement for all bad animated movies now) is "Feel this Moment". You know. That one Pitbull song in 2013. I actually was kind of excited because I thought it was "Take on Me" at first, but no.

There was actually one point in the movie where it had some semblance of being good. Jailbreak is established early on as a strong and independent female character, exemplified further when we found out she's actually a princess emoji that escaped because the only female emojis were princesses and brides. This completely fucks up the established logic of the rest of the movie that clearly shows every emoji having both genders but whatever. It's social commentary. Her goal in the movie is to access the cloud so she can be free from being limited because she's female, which again doesn't really make sense but whatever. Near the end of the movie, Gene and Jailbreak are now in love with each other despite knowing each other for about 2 hours and have just reached Dropbox. Jailbreak reluctantly begins the process of reprogramming Gene, but he predictably doesn't want to be reprogrammed anymore and offers to be with her forever.

In a rather nice twist that caught me off guard, she declines, saying that her mission was to be free, something she couldn't achieve if she had to stay in the texting world where women were limited in who they could be. And I greatly applauded the movie for having a somewhat decent feminist undertone. But then the movie promptly shat all over that when a heartbroken Gene decides that life is no longer worth living and gives himself up to the killer robots, forcing Jailbreak to go back and rescue him.

Smiler is killed, but we find out that Gene and Jailbreak have caused so much mayhem in the phone that Alex had decided to get his entire phone deleted. Whatever. Basically, Gene saves the day by forcibly sending a text to Addie of basically a gif emoji version of him shifting between several different emotions while the phone is being deleted. This new emoji with different faces is so fucking impressive to Addie that she asks Alex out on a date to prom, which somehow convinces him to not delete his phone anymore, because the power of boners is strong with this one. 

And the worst part is, at the end of it all, Gene is heralded as a hero AND JAILBREAK DECIDES TO STAY WITH HIM. She gave up all her dreams that she's had for months to be with her man. A lesson to all feminists, I guess. Oh and the "meh" parents get back together, if you cared about that subplot.

So to recap. We have a terribly cliched story based on several, much better movies that we've already seen. Our wonderful cast is comprised of some asshole whose sole character trait is that he has a regular fucking personality, a gay best friend who's borderline mentally retarded, a "feminist" character who decides to stay with the man where she belongs, and a teenager whose actions are completely dictated by boners. Fan-fucking-tastic. I had more fun getting my wisdom teeth ripped out of my gums.

Accurate representation of me as I watched this "movie"

Final Verdict

This is the shittiest movie of the year by far, not because it's so insultingly bad but because it represents something so insultingly bad. It's a representation of how far corporations are willing to go to make a profit. While other 2017 movies are definitely technically worse, this one is definitely at the very bottom because it fundamentally represents everything that is wrong with movies today. This is a movie about EMOJIS, designed to pander to very young children, and it's utterly pathetic. It's bad as an animation, it's bad as a comedy, its voice acting is subpar, and it sends no message to kids other than "if you're different, people will try to kill you but it's okay". Stay away if you respect the human race.

Score: F