Maybe I’ve been looking at this all wrong from the beginning. I thought Hollywood was run by greedy, cynical assholes who churn out crap they don’t like but think their audiences are stupid enough to love. I believed they were amoral motherfuckers with their entire focus on the bottom line, happy to lie to us about what they were selling. And I believed that they were the villains.
But what if they aren’t? What if, in fact, the people in Hollywood actually love shit like The Emoji Movie. What if all of these executives who have risen to the top of a cutthroat international, multi-billion dollar industry aren’t cold-hearted businessmen, but instead naïve dumbasses more easily entertained than the kid in preschool who puts his hands down his pants and then smells his fingers all day? What if The Emoji Movie reflects what they want to see: colorful amorphous blobs spouting trite horseshit about being true to themselves?
Maybe the writer Mike White, who wrote Chuck and Buck and for Freaks and Geeks, cowrote this movie for free because emojis are the only means for him to truly express himself. Maybe that shitty hack TJ Miller signed on to play a dullard hero not for a paycheck or career strategy but because he knows this is his level, the height to which he is equipped for artistic expression. Maybe comedian Steven Wright decided all of his high-concept jokes weren’t satisfying his deep creative need the way being typecast in a movie about text icons would. Maybe this is the movie they all believed was the very best they could do.
I don’t know which is worse: Hollywood as morons or Hollywood as assholes. All I know is that, either way, audiences are fucked up the ass with the rusty lid from a tin can.
Here’s what else I know: The Emoji Movie is a fucking disaster, an unpleasant, shockingly violent movie starring the most vile and offensive emojis I’ve ever seen. This isn’t for kids, unless you think your little ones are ready for an opening rape scene in which an index finger assaults an okay sign, repeatedly thrusting himself into the hole while she begs for help. Two winking emojis look on and the scene ends with a drop of blood. Sick.
It gets darker from there. Gene (TJ Miller), sees this event and it makes him wonder what larger world exists beyond servitude to vapid assholes who can only express themselves through colorful icons. It sets in motion a military-industrial-entertainment complex hellbent on numbing and dumbing down the population so that they are easier to entertain. In its most avant garde moment, the movie references itself as the ideal kind of shit the complex seeks to satisfy the masses with.
Yet, poor Gene embarks on his quest, walking right into the sharp gears of the machine, and he discovers an underbelly slimier and seamier than even I could dream of after watching too many urinating granny videos while high on codeine.
That opening rape scene is only the beginning. There is the genocide of tiny pizzas, who apparently aren’t liked by the ruling elite thumbs up. Their limp icons dumped into mass graves where tiny birds peck their eyes out before dirt is poured on top. A sex slave ring is made entirely of tiny bouncing baby icons, and I won’t get into any more details on that, except to say the MPAA should probably change the standards on how many entrails can be shown before a movie gets at least a PG-13. Also, did you know there is a bloody diarrhea emoji? I don’t have a cell-phone so I can’t verify this, but the movie is pretty adamant about it.
All the while, Gene is wide-eyed as he slips deeper into the darkness, realizing that behind his tiny smile, his head is full of hurtful, bad ideas. That, as an emoji, his job is to oversimplify and gloss over genuine emotions, what is truly wanted, and to simply fit in. He realizes as long as he can be a grinning fool on the outside, he can be as rooten and horrible as he’d like on the inside. He becomes the bottom in a perverse BDSM relationship, and then a bigamist holding seventeen pretty lady icons captive in his basement, chained to a set of brick wall emojis. In a climactic scene, when Gene truly accepts who he is, and what he can get away with, he becomes the joyful, grateful recipient of a poop emoji on his chest, a Cleveland Steamer, as it is called around here. He rinses himself off in a golden shower.
Actually, none of that is true. I have no fucking idea what happens in the movie because it’s so boring it wasn’t worth my attention. It’s all like a boilerplate message of being yourself, having confidence. All filtered through a million assholes until it’s just finely-chopped manure, crap to sprinkle on your kids so they can grow up to be soulless pricks who can’t feel or express themselves. But maybe that is the message Hollywood truly loves.
I guess it’s the best they can do. One Finger for The Emoji Movie.