‘The LEGO Ninjago Movie’ review: Charming, but repetitive

Deep beneath the often tedious hyperactivity and proclivity for noise of The LEGO Ninjago Movie is a surprisingly gentle, winning heart.

Excessive color, noise

Sure, you have to get past a lot of excessive colorful nonsense and riotous humor. The LEGO Ninjago Movie is after all a children’s movie, and it needs all the help it can get to draw the precious attention of today’s very excitable kids.

The movie, directed by 3 people and written by even more, is a cornucopia of everything and anything that can be built from the overly successful plastic toy blocks. Each of the last two LEGO movies seemed committed to celebrate a specific virtue of the branded toy, with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s The LEGO Movie (2014) championing the awesomeness of creativity, and Chris McKay’s The LEGO Batman Movie (2017) the novel ability to flip existing pop culture brands for the purpose of ingenious irreverence.

The LEGO Ninjago Movie is a lot more cluttered.

It doesn’t promote crafting, or childlike ingenuity, or curious inventiveness. If anything, the movie delights in inoffensive destruction that doesn’t bear any tinge of guilt because it’s done in the spirit of playfulness. 

More commercial, less organic

Yet the film still doesn’t seem to be grounded on any of the trademark charms of the famous building toys. It is more fueled by the necessity to expand its growing cinematic brand to promote its many other spin-offs. 

The LEGO Ninjago Movie feels blatantly commercial. 

The statement sounds a tad silly considering that the whole franchise thrives on the successes of capitalist endeavors. What differentiates it from the previous two LEGO movies is that it is less self-aware and whatever satire that fuels its humor gets lost in translation. The movie seems to attempt to lampoon how Asian culture has been pillaged by the West for quick profit, but the jokes, from utilizing Hollywood-ized Jackie Chan to be the voice of wisdom to the mishmash of Japanese and Chinese pop culture references, do not always result in worthwhile caricature.

Centering on Lloyd (Dave Franco), a high-schooler who is ostracized because he is the son of villainous Garmadon (Justin Theroux), the movie transforms from being a Power Rangers parody into a father-and-son adventure. It is still thoroughly delightful but the movie’s wit, while still outrageous and entertaining, feels derivative and less organic to a consistent and pervasive theme.

Once the movie slows down to reveal what essentially is a conventional but still endearing core, it is almost impossible not to get swayed by how so much nonsense, the most flagrant of which involves a real domesticated cat named Meow-thra totaling the metropolis, can still result in something that is genuinely affecting.

Losing the novelty

While The LEGO Ninjago Movie is still wildly charming, it reveals that the franchise is slowly but surely losing its novelty and luster. – 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.