The Best Of The Worst 'Emoji Movie' Reviews
With Digg Review Roundups, we normally do our best to present a balanced look at the range of critical responses to a work or product, giving space to positive and negative feedback. For Sony Pictures Animation's "The Emoji Movie" (in theaters today) a, uh, slightly different approach is required. Here's what the reviews have to say:
The New York Times Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
For a long time, Hollywood has been propagating the idea that the panderingly, trendily idiotic can be made to seem less so, by polishing it up with bright shiny gloss and enlisting engaging talented performers and writers. I can't be entirely certain of this, but I would say "The Emoji Movie" takes this notion to the outer limits of credibility. The voice cast is full of name actors, some of whom have genuine appeal. One of the screenwriters is the very astute Mike White. This movie's "believe in yourself" message is borne out, in a perverse way, by the very fact that it even exists. And yet the whole thing remains nakedly idiotic.
Vulture Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
Looking back, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there was a small, flickering reason to believe that The Emoji Movie wouldn't be a complete travesty. After all, the adorably ubiquitous pictograms that have become a second language for at least two generations are a public-domain entity; their relative recent rise makes us forget that, licensing-wise, this is no bigger a grab than Leaves: The Movie would be. It was pretty much free to do whatever it wanted within the ridiculous, cynical parameters it had set. The Emoji Movie had nothing to sell aside from itself.
But this was naïve of me, because The Emoji Movie is selling something. In the mock tradition of countless superior Pixar films before it, it's attempting to sell a sense of childlike wonder and fascination with an ordinary, everyday object: your smartphone. And in doing so, it is one of the darkest, most dismaying films I have ever seen, much less one ostensibly made for children.
[Vulture]
Vox Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
It's amazing that we can put a man on the moon, but movies like this still somehow get made. It's amazing that with all that partner money, Sony couldn't pay for a better script, with better lines of humorous dialogue to be delivered by the emojis than "Throw some sauce on that dance burrito!"
It's amazing — or maybe it isn't — that in addition to its poorly conceived Handmaid's Tale stunt, the filmmakers saw fit to have a character sing "Nobody knows the touch screens I've seen / Nobody knows the screenshots," while sitting atop a pile of trash, to the tune of "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," a spiritual written by slaves to bolster their spirits while toiling in the pre-Emancipation American South.
[Vox]
The A.V. Club Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
There was probably never going to be a version of this film that would prove even remotely plausible as a movie someone felt passionately about making for artistic reasons; as far as expanding on smartphone-related IP, this is an even weaker starting point than Sony Animation's recent The Angry Birds Movie. (At least that movie already had its protagonists and antagonists sorted out from the get-go.)
Los Angeles Times Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
There aren't any real jokes, and most laughs come from app recognition — Candy Crush, the Twitter bird, and look, now they're taking a row boat on the "music streams" of Spotify. It's truly just "Intellectual Property: The Movie." If we're laughing at simple brand recognition, then yes, it's true, words aren't cool anymore, and smart phones have made us dumb.
The Wrap Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
You can't judge a movie by its source material: the much-maligned jukebox musical genre gave us "Rock of Ages," yes, but it also made "Singin' in the Rain" possible. And we were all worried about "The Lego Movie" before we saw it. So let us be clear that "The Emoji Movie" is not a soul-crushing disaster simply because its dramatis personae are the range of emotive faces and symbols that live inside your cell phone.
It is a soul-crushing disaster because it lacks humor, wit, ideas, visual style, compelling performances, a point of view or any other distinguishing characteristic that would make it anything but a complete waste of your time, not to mention that of the diligent animators who brought this catastrophe into being.
[The Wrap]
The Hollywood Reporter Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
Given the right combination of inspiration, intelligence and gifted artists, any dumb thing can be turned into an enjoyable film. But Tony Leondis' The Emoji Movie, a very, very dumb thing, comes nowhere near that magic combination. It is fast and colorful enough to attract young kids, but offers nearly nothing to their parents. If only this smartphone-centric dud, so happy to hawk real-world apps to its audience, could have done the same in its release strategy — coming out via Snapchat, where it would vanish shortly after arrival. But even that wouldn't be fast enough.
Variety Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
If you take young children, it will prove a perfectly okay pacifier. Yet the hook of the movie, to the extent that it has one, really is for adults. We're the ones (and not just teenagers) who communicate, more and more, using these pop hieroglyphs, and the film should have made them into wildly popping characters — the kind you want to buy in a toy store not just because they're cute but because they express something elemental. The emojis in "The Emoji Movie" said more before they opened their mouths.
[Variety]
Buzzfeed Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
[T]he viewing experience of The Emoji Movie is akin to letting someone else chew a hangnail off of your hand.
[Buzzfeed]
UPROXX Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
10:59 a.m.: The basic structure of this movie is very confusing. I could write 1000 words about how the work/life balance of each emoji makes no sense. I mean, I won't be doing that, but I could. The gist is that each emoji has to show up to a big stage every time the phone user uses an emoji. This seems very inefficient. My gosh, I really could keep going. I'm going to stop though.
11:01 a.m.: I'm openly rooting for Gene to be executed.
[UPROXX]
IndieWire Lov– Sorry, They Also Hated 'The Emoji Movie'
People, this is a classist family comedy in which James Corden — voicing an anthropomorphic hand named Hi-5 — stands on a pile of obsolete devices and forlornly sings the lyric "Nobody knows the touch screens I've seen," and it's still a significant improvement on the infernal nightmare that's raging beyond the dark walls of the movie theater. It's not even close. Indeed, the most distressing aspect about "The Emoji Movie" is that a spectacle this self-evidently soulless no longer feels like a new low. It doesn't even leave a dent.
TL;DR
Don't watch "The Emoji Movie."
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