‘The LEGO Batman Movie’ review: Taking silliness seriously

Oggs Cruz

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‘The LEGO Batman Movie’ review: Taking silliness seriously
'LEGO Batman' makes full use of the potential gags from the offbeat characters, and the result is plenty of clever and satisfying comedy

What Chris McKay’s The LEGO Batman Movie brings to the overcrowded table of superhero flicks is something remarkable, yet obviously simple. 

The cartoon, utilizing the Danish toy company’s marketing alliance with the Batman brand, is a golden pot of silliness. Mind you, this isn’t the type of silliness borne out of laziness or lack of creative integrity. This is systematic silliness, one that springs from legendary toy’s timeless appeal and capability to inspire boundless imagination out of multi-colored plastic blocks, and a healthy sprinkling of pop culture. 

Profusely wacky

 

So The LEGO Batman Movie begins with a wild chase across the streets of a Gotham City built from hard plastic. Joker (Zach Galifianakis) has come up with another plan to blow up the metropolis with another bomb. Batman (Will Arnett) makes his grand appearance and foils his arch-nemesis’ scheme with his crime-busting moves. He saves the day and retires to rest to save the city another day.

The action is still stirring, rivaling the multi-million spectacles from recent superhero blockbusters out of sheer excess and absurdity. The movie understands that the beauty of playing around with Lego blocks is that while there seems to be no rules at all, the player is bound by a toy design that limits movements and in effect, expressions.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures

McKay recruits the constraints for humor, turning the nimble and lithe vigilante hero into a crude and awkward figure. While the movie requires its audience to take that leap of faith and make believe to envision toys taking part in stunts and dramatic situations, it also rewards immensely. The movie doesn’t let go. The comedy, at times raunchy and slivered with faint innuendos, is ever-present. More importantly, the important feeling of it being a Batman movie is never lost. 

Bringing the fun back 

Decades’ worth of comics, graphic novels, and movies dutifully turned Batman from a fanciful and somewhat friendly caped crusader into the brooding loner that he is now. 

The LEGO Batman Movie doesn’t abandon the superhero’s many iterations for its purposeful silliness. In fact, the movie embraces them, makes use of the franchise’s flip-flopping legacy to enunciate the one denominator that unites all Batmans – his pronounced, and sometimes mistakenly celebrated, loneliness. 

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures

The most important conceit of the movie is to treat that loneliness as both a recurring joke and an opportunity to take a virtue being offered by the toy company as a moral theme to ground the free-wheeling narrative. The movie’s persistence to push its self-centered protagonist to possibilities of companionship, cooperation and love is both hilarious and curiously poignant.

Fun and seemingly senseless

It’s all a lot of fun, all seemingly senseless and inane.

However, when playtime’s over and the jokes and giggles have settled, what remains is a sustained feeling of profound satisfaction, that amidst the movie’s insistence to entertain, it does so with its heart for the two franchises its title bears, and all their various fans. – Rappler.com 

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.

 




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