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

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "The Lego Batman Movie"

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles review

                   Nostalgia is the engine of the post-modern dilemma that enables our inability to create new cultural or artist forms, in favor of remixing or rebooting the old standards with an updated sheen.  Studios green-light movies like the recent “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” reboot because they trust the success of the brand-name, and judging from the 65 million dollar opening and the announcement of a 2016 sequel, it would seem with good reason. Despite the public outcry against an early draft of the script that leaked online a couple years back, with the rumors of an added alien mythology and the confirmation of Megan Fox cast in lead, these kinds of pre-recognized titles make money, usually by collecting from the very same people who furiously blog against them.

                 Having been preached against on every forum and every comment section on the web as the Michael Bay molestation of our childhood to come, and gauging from the outrage against the hyper-detailed, fulgliness of the new character designs that were revealed with the preceding trailers and poster art, you would have thought this movie was destined to be a flop of “Heaven’s Gate” proportions.  But, as it turns out, you would have thought wrong, and, unfortunately, I am not surprised.  Though this most recent Ninja Turtles reboot wasn’t actually directed by the infamously successful Michael Bay—only released through Bay’s remake-centric production company, Platinum Dunes—and directed by Jonathan Liebesman who knows how to suck all on his own, responsible for matinee, empty-calorie buffet slop like “Wrath of the Titans” and “Battle LA,” this is exactly the kind of over-buttered pop-corn rubbish you might imagine it to be. Though the original iterations of the franchise were never Shakespeare, TMNT- 2014 might actually succeed in making the internet’s most angry dissenters wish Bay had been at the helm all along.

                Unchanged from the established origin, four baby turtles are mutated through genetic goo called mutagen and are released into the sewers, where they eventually become super-strong, humanoid ninja teenagers. Under the streets of New York, their master Splinter, a mutant rat, has spent their most recent years training the team to fight against a newly organized ninja terrorist gang known as the Foot Clan. Journalist April O’Neil (Megan Fox) has an inkling of the Turtles vigilantly work and is anxious to advance here career from covering ridiculous human-interest pieces to exposing hard-hitting news about reptilian superheroes.  Somewhere in the mix, an ex-colleague of April’s scientist father named Eric Sacs (William Fichtner) is protecting the Foot’s mysterious leader The Shredder, who has his own plans to repurpose the mutagen that created his foes.

                With the studio’s primary interest in updating the base aesthetics of the Turtle’s Saturday-morning appeal by changing their look, their surroundings, and their outdated surfer colloquialisms, this movie serves us back a repackaged product that breaks upon opening.  It seems what happened is while Liebesman and company got so caught-up in refurbishing all the surfaces, they forgot to put back the nuts and bolts that make the story work, leaving us with nothing to attach ourselves to except for the absurdity of the premise.  Rewrites and bad studio notes are achingly visible as April’s unneeded origin is weaved into the backstory of our heroes and the disparate parts of script are taped together with function-based characters like Fichtner’s billionaire bad-guy and comedically placed characters like April’s camera-man Vernon, awkwardly phoned-in by television’s Will Arnett.

                As was expected, this film is based entirely on set-pieces and action spectacle, and while our minimally-written heroes are flipping and kicking and sliding around in practically every scene they have together, we can only piece together their individual characteristics through snips of barely audible dialogue, buried underneath the overwhelming sound-design. Visually, Liebesman tries to ape Bay’s crooked lens and whip-pan style and even manages to ruin the fluidity of that with his usual epileptic camera-work. Surprisingly, this movie doesn’t even fail in the same screeching, headache-inducing ways found in the worst moments of the Transformer’s movies, and instead settles for pandering fan-fare and bland ineptitude.

Grade: D

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014