“EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!!!” is the name of the bouncy central song in “The Lego Movie.” At last: A movie with something to say.
Yet a slight ironic adjustment connects the movie’s main song to its themes, one of which is that everything sucks.
As cute and energetic as it is, “The Lego Movie” is more exhausting than fun, too unsure of itself to stick with any story thread for too long. The action scenes are enthusiastic, colorful but uninvolving, like an 8-year-old emptying a bucket of plastic blocks.
A wise old prophet (Morgan Freeman) is overcome by the villainous, corporatist Lord Business (Will Ferrell), who seizes the evil weapon the “Kragle,” which turns out to be Krazy Glue, that threatens to cement everybody in place. Lego world, the wizard says, can be saved from the Kragle only by an unsuspecting random guy dubbed “the Special” who turns out to be Emmet (Chris Pratt), an oafish construction worker.
Emmet’s a likable chap who doesn’t deserve the insults thrown his way by everyone else — not just a ruthless cop (Liam Neeson) on his trail, but a butt-kicking avenger Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) who rescues him and her boyfriend, Lego Batman (Will Arnett, doing an amusing growl).
The humor ranges from slapstick to rapid-fire pop allusions that are “Simpsons”-style, but not “Simpsons”-caliber. Much of the latter consists of meta-jokes (a Green Lantern voiced by Jonah Hill sucks up to a jockish Superman voiced by Channing Tatum; a line of dialogue goes “blah blah blah proper name place name back-story stuff”) or feeble little stabs of satire. Asked for his favorite eatery, everyman Emmet says, “Any chain restaurant.”
Because . . . no little kid would be caught dead in one of those? Here is a movie in which a $15 billion toy merchant and a $57 billion entertainment conglomerate join forces to lecture us on the evils of buying. Despite lots of gags about how dull and conformist Emmet’s world is, the anti-consumerist drum isn’t beaten to shreds the way it was in “The Lorax.” But none of the other ideas work very well, either.
Digitally animated to look like the stop-motion process behind those Gen-X beloved 1960s cartoons, the film is lovingly detailed, but spoofs are better suited to sketch comedy. They tend to grow monotonous at length. The old stop-motion productions loved their characters and developed stories in scenes backed by what now looks like Shakespearean patience, whereas “The Lego Movie” is all toddler-meets-Red-Bull chaos.
The experience is like being trapped inside a popcorn popper. Not until the very end, with an awkward pullback from the toys to the boy playing with them, is there even an attempt to deliver some “Toy Story” heart, but the theme of this final act (that Legos aren’t for grown-ups) is about as profound as a Trix commercial.
I picture Buzz Lightyear watching “The Lego Movie” and announcing, “Star command, request evacuation pod immediately. Sugar-rush explosion among tiny life forms has created hazardous comedy debris field.”