The LEGO Movie

Could it be true? Is scat­ter­brained con­struc­tion opus The LEGO Movie real­ly the biggest, longest, most relent­less­ly kalei­do­scop­ic toy com­mer­cial ever made? There are moments when this hyper­charged odyssey cer­tain­ly feels like it. It’s not real­ly a film, as such. More like the depraved Hol­ly­wood habit for extreme prod­uct place­ment tak­en to its nat­ur­al, hor­ri­fy­ing con­clu­sion. By rights, it should be ter­ri­ble. And yet, against all the odds, every­thing just clicks together.

The film stars Chris Pratt (immense­ly like­able, as ever, even when he’s not phys­i­cal­ly on-screen) as Emmet, a builder busy scrap­ing a liv­ing in a fake plas­tic land. One day, after a par­tic­u­lar­ly bom­bas­tic shift down at the site, Emmet dis­cov­ers the mys­te­ri­ous Piece of Resis­tance. It’s an ancient arte­fact that, accord­ing to the prophe­cy of Vit­ru­vius (a play­ful Mor­gan Free­man, in full-on God mode) will foil the plans of the evil Pres­i­dent Busi­ness (Will Fer­rell, chan­nelling his inner Mugatu) and save this pre­car­i­ous pock­et uni­verse from an eter­ni­ty of glue-based terror.

At its worst, when the film is in ​“hero’s jour­ney” mode, The LEGO Movie feels like a man­ic spin on Disney’s dull video game yarn Wreck-it Ralph, albeit much smarter in its exe­cu­tion and archi­tec­ture. At its best, it’s a whirling dervish that recalls the inven­tive­ness of top-tier Aard­man or the sur­re­al flights of Michel Gondry.

Admit­ted­ly the plot is lit­tle more than a spring­board for all man­ner of brick-based visu­al tom­fool­ery. As Emmet and his band of fools (includ­ing Will Arnett as the most hilar­i­ous­ly douchey ver­sion of Bat­man ever) trav­el through an assort­ment of worlds (Mid­dle Zealand! Cloud Cuck­ooland! The Old West!) there’s a series of glee­ful­ly imag­i­na­tive set-pieces that thrill in their sheer sense of phys­i­cal­i­ty. Explo­sions. Clouds. Even waves upon the sea. They’re all vivid­ly brought to life in tac­tile chunks of pixel­lat­ed LEGO. It’s like that icon­ic White Stripes video (going back to Gondry) but blown up to an epic scale. As a result, there’s real tex­ture and sen­su­al­i­ty to the action that you sim­ply don’t get in most stu­dio CG fare. Crafts­man­ship abounds.

You can thank Phil Lord and Chris Miller for that. They’re the irrev­er­ent tal­ents behind the sim­i­lar­ly unhinged Cloudy With a Chance of Meat­balls, and that affa­bly sac­ri­le­gious 21 Jump Street reboot from a cou­ple of years ago. We’re always shocked when any­thing made by this dev­il­ish­ly tal­ent­ed duo turns out infi­nite­ly bet­ter than it has any right to be. But why the sur­prise? They have imag­i­na­tion in spades, and the resources of a small coun­try, like some kind of Satan­ic com­bo of Ham­mer & Tongs and Judd Apa­tow. They should be cheered and feared in equal measure.

Like their pre­vi­ous films, The LEGO Movie takes gid­dy plea­sure in build­ing up a metic­u­lous and ludi­crous uni­verse, only to knock it down again in an epilep­tic fit of child­ish aban­don. It’s pos­si­bly one of the most enter­tain­ing films about nos­tal­gia to emerge from the stu­dio sys­tem since Dis­ney decid­ed to crank the The Mup­pets back into bit­ter­sweet action in 2012.

Not all the jokes con­nect, and per­haps that’s inevitable when you’re deal­ing with some­thing that’s so jam-packed with whim­sy. Thank­ful­ly, the film’s impu­dence calms down in an auda­cious, divi­sive final move­ment that sees Lord and Miller steer their sto­ry into more melan­cholic ter­ri­to­ry. Here, they rather fear­less­ly and, arguably, quite clum­si­ly posi­tion The LEGO Movie for con­sid­er­a­tion along­side some of the great films about child­hood and imag­i­na­tion, like Where the Wild Things Are or Time Ban­dits. Their eyes are clear­ly big­ger than their stom­ach, how­ev­er, and they don’t quite man­age the tran­si­tion. But how thrilling to see them try.