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Emoji movie production company4/7/2024 ![]() Leondis and company don’t get much mileage out of the vast variety of emojis they might use for sight gags, but they do well enough with the slapstick adventure of Gene’s quest from home to the cloud. (Amusingly, the closing credits identify this slumming actor as “Sir Patrick Stewart.”) Hell, they can’t even come up with fresh-smelling one-liners about the movie’s resident poop icon. When Alex wonders what to text the girl he has a crush on, his pal scowls “words aren’t cool” - in a Manhattan preview where critics were outnumbered by ordinary moviegoers, nearly all of the laughter was directed at this sort of line, where three grown men try and fail to convincingly imagine how kids talk. The dialogue is even lamer when the pic’s three scribes depict the life of Alex, the high-school kid who owns the phone Gene inhabits. When our heroes need to ride streams of music from one place to another, one coos, “Whoa - this is Spotify?!” when Jailbreak leads Gene into Dropbox, their pursuers can’t follow them inside because “this app is secure.” At best, these episodes are limp set pieces at worst, they sound like they were written by ad agencies. The characters spend several minutes stuck in Candy Crush (gags about Hi-5’s sweet tooth go on about five times longer than they should) they nearly die in a Dance Dance Revolution-style challenge game. Getting there affords the filmmakers plenty of opportunities for product placement. (Who could play the elder embodiment of Blah other than Steven Wright?) We learn that free-spirited Gene, thanks to some glitch, is capable of infinite facial expressions. Miller), a youngster preparing to take over for his old man as the face of Meh. We’re told both that “the pressure’s always on” for the face-emoji residents of Textopolis to keep their expressions convincing - smiley or smirking, angry or puzzled - and that they have no choice: That weeping guy keeps gushing tears even when he wins the lottery he’s just programmed that way. The project’s first hurdle is imagining how an emoji icon, which by definition represents only one emotional state (or object), can be a character capable of experiencing a story. 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. It is fast and colorful enough to attract young kids, but offers nearly nothing to their parents. But Tony Leondis’ The Emoji Movie, a very, very dumb thing, comes nowhere near that magic combination. Given the right combination of inspiration, intelligence and gifted artists, any dumb thing can be turned into an enjoyable film.
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