This is no bandwagon review.

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The story follows the ‘meh’ emoji, known as Gene (Miller), as he is thrown to the scrapheap for not being ‘meh’ enough. You see, Gene can’t contain his emotions and can transform into various emoji’s – what a fraud. In order to keep his place within the Cube – the grid where all the emoji’s wait for their moment to be used in a message – he joins forces with Hi-5 (Corden), funnily enough the high five emoji, to track down a mystery hacker known as Jailbreak (Faris) who can mess with the system and make them FAVOURITE EMOJI’S. Pursued by nefarious bots - under the watchful eye of the Cube leader Smiler (Rudolph) – they must make their way to DropBox (sigh) to be uploaded to the cloud and emoji nirvana. It’s all about team work and sticking true to yourself guys.

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Oh yea, his mum and dad are ‘meh’ too. Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge collect a pay cheque for those guys.

 

Oh, the phone is owned by a noob called Alex (Jake T. Austin) who fancies Addie (Tati Gabrielle) but can’t quite muster up the WORDS to talk to her – see where this is going...?

 

Sir Patrick Stewart voices the turd emoji.

 

The movie is crammed to the brim with ‘cool’ references that the youth of today will associate with – or according to Columbia Pictures and Sony they will. Hashtags, DropBox, Facebook, YouTube, Candy Crush and Spotify are all shamelessly hawked about for nothing but mere advertisement. Don’t worry all, there’s plenty of OMG action too.

 

The jokes didn’t land, which is unforgiveable for an animated comedy. This is the thing, they really WEREN’T funny. It’s easy to jump on something which isn’t great and trash every aspect of it, but it failed at its own genre. The plot was just rehashed and recycled from other animated properties (Wreck-It Ralph anyone?)

 

Over five minutes was taken up with these emoji’s dancing around in Just Dance simply to pass time I’d imagine, and to try and begat the Emoji Drop – a dancing emoji. However, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” got some airtime and this took me blissfully out of the movie. Christina Aguilera literally couldn’t help but feel this moment as that was played and played over and over.

 

Also, why didn’t Alex just turn his phone on silent rather than be constantly embarrassed by his phone?

 

“In the trash? Me? I used to be somebody” said James Corden, with some brilliant foreshadowing.

 

The animation looked just fine (the Cloud looked like Ghost in the Shell…) and SIR Patrick Stewart voices the turd, so there’s some positives to be had.

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Also, those Princess Meh babies are a-comin’!

 

That’s about it really, there’s not an awful lot to say about a movie that just didn’t need to be made. Is it a cash grab? If so, it failed spectacularly looking at its incoming ticket sales. It looked fine, and the voice actors were OK – Corden aside who really wasn’t good, sorry fella.

 

Incredibly, this isn’t the worst movie of 2017 (hi Rings) it literally is just ‘meh’.

 

Why Sony, why?

 

If need you emoji’s to express emotion ahead of words, leave the planet.