Video review: "The Lego Movie"

Not everything is awesome about “The Lego Movie” -- despite the assertion of that obsessively earworm-y song from Tegan and Sara featured in the kiddie animated flick from earlier this year. However, it is a boingy, entertaining thrill ride that is sure to keep younger children occupied for a goodly chunk of their summer vacation.

It might get old pretty quick for parents – I’ve already watched it three times with my 3½-year-old, and am ready to bring a book to our next couch time together. But this hyperactive flick isn’t made for oldsters.

Told mostly in Lego format, with the people, places and things made up of the iconic construction toys, the film follows the adventures of Emmet (spiffily voiced by Chris Pratt). A normal, generic, rather anonymous worker, he lives in a world where everyone follows the rules of their banal society.

Then he falls in with Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a member of the gang of Master Builder insurgents rebelling against the tyrannical Lord Business (Will Ferrell), who hates it when people use their imaginations rather than following the instructions that come with each Lego set.

There’s also a wise wizard (Morgan Freeman), a cop who’s both good and bad (Liam Neeson), pirate/robot Metal Beard (Nick Offerman) and Batman (Will Arnett), who’s additionally Wyldstyle’s bad-boy beau.

The animation is funky, and funny. It’s meant to look low-tech, as if everything really were made of the blocky toys. So the characters have drawn-on faces (watch out for nail polish remover!) and claw hands. Yet the computer-generated look is flashy and textured. I loved how when Emmet takes a shower, blue blocks representing water spill over his body.

Just like the song, “The Lego Movie” will grow increasingly irritating with repetition. But your kids will enjoy it the first time, and the 47th.

The movie comes with a host of video extras, including a feature-length commentary track. There are also outtakes, deleted scenes, storyboards, animations tests, making-of featurettes and spotlights on particular characters like Batman. There are even short movies made by fans using Lego blocks.

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Review: "22 Jump Street"

If you're tempted to make a joke about "22 Jump Street," the sequel to the hit comedy starring Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, continuing with future iterations of "23 Jump Street," and so on, don't bother. The movie has already beaten you to the punch at poking fun at itself.

In fact, one of the most refreshing thing about this reboot of the 1980s TV show is that it gleefully wallows in its own crass commercialism. It's a wicked send-up of not only the whole buddy-cop genre, but of itself.

Our film comedies have now reached the level of ironic detachment where the snake is eating its own tail. Nothing we see is meant to be taken at face value. So the stars aren't playing the roles of undercover cops posing as college students -- one the brainy dweeb and the other the lunkhead bruiser -- but the parody versions of them.

At one point, Hill and Tatum walk into their new "undercover" police headquarters, which happens to be right across the street from their old one. Next door, the "23 Jump Street Apartments" are currently under construction.

If you think that's hip and hilarious, wait till the end credits, which takes the same joke and runs it into the end zone, spikes the ball, bursts out of the stadium into the parking lot, and keeps going.

After inept rookie cops Schmidt and Jenko (Hill and Tatum, respectively) managed to break up a huge high school drug ring, they're tasked with doing the same thing again at MC State. When Schmidt tries to suggest other approaches, their deputy chief (Nick Offerman) sternly enforces the rule of sequels: do exactly the same thing as last time.

This they do, with the socially awkward Schmidt struggling to fit into the college party scene, while Jenko makes the football team as a walk-on and bonds with their charismatic quarterback (Wyatt Russell), who may or may not be lynchpin of campus narcotics trafficking.

The specifics of the plot are so tiresome that co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and their trio of screenwriters barely even bother to pay attention to them. The movie mostly jumps from scene to scene, generally involving Hill and Tatum spewing out motormouth gibberish, making fools of themselves while also commenting on the proceedings as they're unfolding. The movie doesn't so much do jokes as stages uncomfortable situations.

This is the comedy of embarrassment. Much of this is painful to watch, and in seeing our boys squirm we are intended to derive laughs.

And there are a lot of them, though there are long stretches in the middle where we feel more sorry for the people we're following than amused by them.

The lead actors are both in their 30s, and look it, and one of the running gags is that absolutely no one they meet believes they are college age.

"I'm 19," Schmidt says, straight-faced.

"Nineteen minutes late to the pinochle game?" a snarky girl responds.

After awhile, though, the shtick starts to wear thin and we know everything that's going to happen -- like that no gunfight can commence without an extended back-and-forth of insults and quips between the antagonists.

At nearly two hours long, "22 Jump Street" far outstays its welcome. Like an actual college party, it's raucous and intoxicating for awhile, but after 90 minutes you've seen all there is to see, and the music shuffle starts to repeat.

Review: "The Lego Movie"

"The Lego Movie" is utterly forgettable but also undeniably fun. It's aimed straight at the single-digit age group, and is so fast-paced that older, slower minds may have trouble following all the action. But as disposable entertainment for kids, its hits its mark square-on.

If you're not aware of the franchise of Lego entertainment based on the iconic snap-together toys, then you must have had your head buried or not be a parent to young children. Often used to recreate populist favorites like Star Wars, they are near-ubiquitous in videos and gaming. Those little Lego-people with blocky bodies torsos and hook hands are the stars.

This is the first feature film featuring the yellow gang, and they've brought in a team of animation veterans with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller ("Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"), who co-wrote and -directed. They keep the movie bright, light and zany.

The set-up is rather cute: all the people live in a multi-faceted universe divided up into realms that match various Lego theme sets -- medieval, pirates, wild West, etc. All are ruled by Lord Business (voice by Will Ferrell), who likes for everything to be put together exactly according to the instructions to match the pictures on the front of the box. Any "weird stuff" is perpetually torn down and rebuilt.

Emmet (a terrific Chris Pratt) is an ordinary construction work -- so ordinary, in fact, that he's virtually indistinguishable from the crowd and doesn't have any friends. But like all the others he's been brainwashed into a life of superficial happiness, where everyone watches the same TV show ("Where Are My Pants?"), eats only at chain restaurants and sing and dance to the same omnipresent song ("Everything Is Awesome!", which actually is catchy in a supremely annoying way.)

But there is a rebellion afoot led by the Master Builders -- figures who can instantly piece together complex objects and vehicles from the various Lego pieces lying about. Emmet stumbles right into their plot and finds himself stuck to the Piece of Resistance, a nondescript block, that marks him as the Chosen One who will lead the overthrow of the tyrannical Business.

Trouble is, Emmet is such an unimaginative, vanilla type of guy that he seems to lack the basic skill set of a savior. A better choice would be Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a super-smart and talented rainbow-haired rebel who hitches on as Emmet's resentful sidekick.

Emmet is soon smitten by her, though she's in a committed relationship with her boyfriend, Batman ... yes, the Batman, deliciously voiced by Will Arnett. In this universe, anybody can appear in Lego form, so Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern also make cameos.

Rounding out the cast are Morgan Freeman as Vitruvius, an old sage and prophet; Nick Offerman as pirate/robot Metalbeard; Liam Neeson as Bad Cop/Good Cop, whose mood is determined by which way his head is turned; Uni-Kitty (Alison Brie), a cat/unicorn hybrid; and Benny, a "1980s space guy" voiced by Charlie Day.

The animation looks deceptively simplistic at first, since everything and everyone is made up of Lego parts. But the CG is actually quite detailed, and the pieces fly together so quickly it must have been a chore to animate.

"The Lego Movie" surprises with its carefree attitude and zippy antics. This won't make anyone's best-of list, but as throwaway entertainment during cinema's frigid season, it's a superb fit.

Review: "21 Jump Street"

I give "21 Jump Street" a lot of points for trying. What looked to be a cynical reboot of an '80s TV show is actually a decently funny spoof that doesn't take itself too seriously.

It's the sort of flick in which the 30-ish stars seem slightly mortified at the idea of passing themselves off as high-schoolers, even as undercover police officers looking to infiltrate a ring of drug dealers. The joke-within-a-joke, of course, is that nearly every Hollywood movie set in high school regularly features actors in their mid- to late-20s portraying teens, and plenty north of 30.

I appreciated the nudge-nudge-wink-wink scene where two bumbling cops get told about their assignment to the 21 Jump Street program, which the police chief describes as revived thing from the 1980s that's being brought back because nobody has any new ideas, so they're just recycling old ones.
Pretty cool when a movie will zing itself.

Jonah Hill came up with the story along with Michael Bacall, the screenwriter who also penned the inventive "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World." Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller previously made "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," making them the latest in a string of animation guys to jump to live-action films. (Though "Meatballs" was their first feature film, so it wasn't like they were cartoon for life.)

Hill plays what his become his typical character, the nerdy loser who discovers untapped reservoirs of talent and confidence. In the amusing opening sequence, set in 2005, he's decked out in Eminem 'do and outfit, clumsily asking a girl to prom and being shot down very publicly. His chief tormenter is Tatum, a popular jock and would-be prom king, except his grades were so bad the principal wouldn't let him go to prom. (Not quite sure what academic system allows you to graduate but not go to a party, but there you have it.)

Hill's character is repeatedly teased for being fat, which is curious because of course Hill had a well-publicized massive weight loss, and could not even properly be called chubby now.

Flash to the present, and the two become best buds at the police academy. Unfortunately, they're assigned to the bike patrol in the city park, and somehow manage to mess up even that. As a last resort, they're assigned to Jump Street, where Ice Cube plays the captain, an angry black man who knows he's a caricature, but with these two idjits it's hard not to be P.O.'d all the time.

They're passed off as brothers and sent to infiltrate Sagan High School. In one of the movie's funnier riffs, the cool kids are no longer status-seeking snobs but politically correct ego-advocates. Tatum, trying to replicate his brash BMOC routine from back in the day, finds himself ostracized for punching out a gay kid and his gas-guzzling vintage muscle car. Hill, though, unexpectedly finds himself accepted as part of the new ruling elite, causing friction between the best bros.

There are plenty of good laughs, some witty and some crude, like the scene where they score drugs but are forced to take them on school grounds to prove they're not narcs, and try to make each other puke by sticking their fingers down the other guy's throat.

But the movie goes sideways somewhere in the middle, getting bogged down by Hill's budding romance with the cool drama girl (Brie Larson) and Tatum's bonding with some science nerds.

I liked the way "21 Jump Street" played around with the conventions of the genre -- including the two cops' repeated disappointment that more things don't explode during their big car chase. I didn't quite like it enough to give it a full green light, but it's nice to see a flick that far exceeds your expectations.

2.5 stars out of four