The Emoji Movie Review

The premise is not automatically bad. A city inside a phone is workable, and the film opens with a decent idea: Gene is supposed to have one expression and cannot hold it. That is a story about being unable to perform the self other people expect. The film states it in dialogue roughly six times and dramatizes it once.

The map is where it goes wrong. Gene's journey is a route through named commercial products, and at each stop the product simply works correctly. Candy Crush is a level of Candy Crush. Just Dance is a dance number in Just Dance. Dropbox is a safe hiding place, presented as a feature list. There is no friction in any of these places, no joke at the app's expense, nothing the film wants to argue about them, so the sequences function exactly the way advertisements do and the plot halts while they play.

The craft is not the failure. Sony Pictures Animation renders the phone world cleanly, the Just Dance sequence has real color and momentum, and the voice cast, which includes T.J. Miller, Anna Faris, James Corden and Patrick Stewart, plays the material straight and lands what can be landed. Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge get the only two lines with any shape to them.

It became the first animated feature ever to take the Razzie for worst picture, in the award's thirty eight years. It also made several times its budget, which is why films built this way keep getting made.