dvd of the week
The Lego Movie could be the greatest advertisement ever made. I couldn’t prevent myself from buying Legos after seeing it. But it’s a great movie in and of itself, brilliantly animated, extremely funny and surprisingly emotional affecting. Emmet (Chris Pratt) is a construction worker in a city that runs with clockwork precision. Everyone is perfectly regimented, efficient and properly tasked. Everyone loves the same song “Everything is Awesome!” and the same TV show Where’s My Pants? and their leader President Business (Will Ferrell). The president is actually a dictator with a massive army of evil robots and nasty cops (the leader of which is voiced by Liam Neeson) at his command, and he is planning to destroy the Lego universe using a weapon called the Kragle. As Emmet goes on his hero’s journey, he meets the wild and diverse Lego people from across the Lego dimensions: the Wild West, pirates, space, DC superheroes, Star Wars and one land that is not a branded type of Lego where utterly free-form experimentation rules. As in most underdog-hero movies, the result of the quest and conflict is pretty much preordained, but writers and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, in addition to mixing witty and sly adult-oriented jokes with kid-pleasing slapstick, which they do better than most animated films of the last several years, work on multiple thematic levels, creating a morally and ethically complex film out of what could have been a cynical advertisement.
