Lego Batman Movie review

Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s “The Lego Movie” conceptualized a meta world where many characters from different pop culture entities could collide and collaborate in support of the same comedic context. “The Lego Batman Movie,” takes this premise and explores the world of DC’s Gotham City. Here, the characters are aware that they are in a spoof, and the long-standing comic book lore is only used a basis for something broader, while also taking specific jabs at previous iterations of the caped crusader.

In this blocky, hyper-stylized universe, Batman (Voiced by Will Arnett) is an ego-maniacal loner who saves the city for attention at night, so he can enjoy the privacy to watch rom-coms and eat lobster in his mansion during the day.  His butler Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) is concerned that he’s walled away his emotions and isn’t reaching out to others for support. Even The Joker (Zach Galifianakis) doesn’t understand why Batman can’t appreciate their unique hero/villain relationship, so he takes it upon himself to prove that he’s Batman’s greatest foe, by releasing the world’s greatest supervillains on the city. This forces the stubborn Bat to save Lego Gotham from certain destruction by collaborating with his newly adopted ward Robin (Michael Cera) and the city’s new Commissioner Barbara Gordon (Roserio Dawson).

Obviously, much of this is supposed to be silly. The humor is tossed off as scenes quickly jump from reference to reference and joke to joke. The speedy pace of the film keeps things from drowning in its own absurdity but it also keeps things rather light and surface-oriented as well. Whereas the first Lego Movie had a statement to make about commercialization and the corporate nature of its own existence, there’s nothing quite as lofty or as subversive attempted in this straight-forward style parody.

Visually, the Lego novelty is used to good effect. The production design is stylish and appealing and many of the action scenes, while sometimes over-crowding the frame and edited too quickly to fully register, are creative and exceptional within the world of family-oriented entertainment.

Director and co-writer Chris McKay comes from the world of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, having directed many episodes of “Moral Orel” and “Robot Chicken.” Though “The Lego Batman Movie” is painted on a much larger canvass, it has the same disposable, premise-oriented frivolity of something like a “Robot Chicken” sketch, especially as characters from “Harry Potter,” “Lord of the Rings” and “Jaws” are roped into the final act of the feature for meta-comedic effect.  

The approach here is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Given the sheer volume and variety of jokes, there’s enough laughs to justify the other bits that thud, but this scattershot, writers-room approach occasionally dilutes the overall vision of the project. Nevertheless, there was an attempt to create an actual story-arc with Arnett’s Batman and his adopted family.  Because that arc is never dropped amidst the joke-a-minute riffing and the visually cluttered Lego action sequences, the movie is allowed some amount of sloppiness so long as the story’s foundation can support it, and, for the most part, it does.

Grade: B- 

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2017

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