The Lego Batman Movie (2017) Review

Time: 114 Minutes
Age Rating: Violence
Cast:
Will Arnett as Bruce Wayne/Batman (voice)
Zach Galifianakis as The Joker (voice)
Michael Cera as Dick Grayson/Robin (voice)
Rosario Dawson as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl (voice)
Ralph Fiennes as Alfred Pennyworth (voice)
Director: Chris McKay

There are big changes brewing in Gotham, but if Batman (Will Arnett) wants to save the city from the Joker’s (Zach Galifianakis) hostile takeover, he may have to drop the lone vigilante thing, try to work with others and maybe, just maybe, learn to lighten up. Maybe his superhero sidekick Robin (Michael Cera) and loyal butler Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) can show him a thing or two.

The Lego Batman Movie was one of my most anticipated movies of 2017. I liked 2014’s The Lego Movie, so I was interested to see what this spin off would be like. I really liked the movie when I first saw it, however I’ve noticed that my thoughts on it have changed. While it’s not bad, over time its quality has definitely dropped. There’s honestly not much to say about this movie, it’s quite enjoyable when you see it but it’s rather forgettable. There’s not a whole lot that this movie does bad but there’s also not a whole lot that this movie does great.

It’s difficult to be bored during this movie, it’s paced pretty well so adults and children alike are at least paying attention to what’s going on. This movie does pay tribute Batman well, there’s references to Batman interpretations, from the movies to the comics books. This movie also pokes fun at clichés and the situations that many of the characters find themselves in, the movie is self aware. When the jokes are good, they are really good. So that’s what the movie does well. Now onto the mixed parts of the movie… The humour is unfortunately a bit of a mixed bag, a lot of the jokes are hit and miss. As I said, when the jokes are good, they are really good. The other times it just falls flat. The wit and humour in The Lego Movie was great and it feels like the writers for Lego Batman was trying to replicate that here but it just doesn’t work as well, especially as there are just way too many jokes. This movie does have balancing issues, at one point it is throwing endless amounts of jokes all at once and then suddenly the tone changes and it suddenly wants us to care about what’s going on. That’s another aspect that wasn’t done that well. Batman in this movie does have some subplot about him being too scared about having a family (which by the way has been done hundreds of times over) but aside from that, there’s not much reason to care about what’s going on. The emotional aspect of the movie didn’t work well, which is as a result of way too many jokes undercutting it and lack of development, these ‘emotional’ moments really didn’t feel earned when they actually happened. As for other gripes I have, this movie really milked the amount of properties and franchises that they had. Yes, The Lego Movie had that but it never felt overwhelming, here that definitely is the case and it was too much. The movie is entertaining, but that’s all I can really say about it.

The voice cast was all around really good. Will Arnett was great as Lego Batman, Zack Galifianakis surprisingly worked well as The Joker. Other voice cast with Michael Cera as Robin, Ralph Fiennes as Alfred, Rosario Dawson as Barbara Gordon and others were really great as their respective characters. I had no problems with the voice cast.

The animation is pretty much the same quality and style as in The Lego Movie, stop motion mixed with CGI and it is great. The action is fast paced and entertaining, it is enjoyable to watch. Personally I never had any issues in how this movie was actually directed.

The Lego Batman movie was pretty much what I expected it to be. If you didn’t like The Lego Movie, you probably won’t like this movie. Otherwise, like the first movie you’ll find this to me an entertaining movie for both kids and adults to enjoy. That’s something I can say, I had a fun time with the movie but it’s the type of movie that gets worse the more I think about it. I must be a minority, most people really enjoy it quite a lot. Make no mistake, it is a decent movie. Give it a watch at least, just lower your expectations a bit.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) Review

Time: 101 Minutes
Age Rating: Medium Level Violence
Cast:
Johnny Knoxville as Leonardo (voice)
Pete Ploszek as Leonardo (motion capture)
Alan Ritchson as Raphael
Noel Fisher as Michelangelo
Jeremy Howard as Donatello
Megan Fox as April O’Neil
Malina Weissman as Young April
Will Arnett as Vern Fenwick
William Fichtner as Eric Sacks
Tony Shalhoub as Splinter (voice)
Danny Woodburn as Splinter (motion capture)
Tohoru Masamune as Shredder
Whoopi Goldberg as Bernadette Thompson
Director: Jonathan Liebesman

Spawned from a lab experiment gone awry, teenage terrapins Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael live in the sewers beneath New York. Although their rodent sensei, Splinter, advises against showing themselves above ground, the justice-loving, pizza-eating brothers can’t stand idly by while evil Shredder and his minions terrorize the city. With help from intrepid reporter April O’Neil (Megan Fox) and her cameraman (Will Arnett), the Turtles set out to save New York.

I wasn’t excited for this film for a number of reasons, first of all I’m not a big TMNT fan and second of all, Michael Bay produced it and at this point it’s not even worth trying to expect good things coming out of him at this point (Though I heard 13 Hours was pretty good). However despite all that this movie really wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. There are some decent action scenes and I wasn’t really bored throughout this movie. However, it’s still not a good movie and has almost all the elements that made Transformers such a failure.

The film focuses more on April O’Neil, which I think is a pretty big mistake. It’s like how the Transformers movies focussed more on the human over the Transformers. I don’t know why Michael Bay keeps having movies focus on the humans instead of the titular characters, humans aren’t the most interesting characters when the movie has giant mutant turtles. Also the tone was a little too serious, it had the tone of a Transformers movie, that’s the vibe that I got throughout the movie. I don’t know much about TMNT but I do know that they usually have a lighter tone. Also I felt that the story wasn’t very strong, I didn’t particularly care about what was going on, I was just enjoying the action when it was happening.

Megan Fox isn’t a very good actress but she was fine in her role, she didn’t distract as much as I thought she would. The performance that surprisingly annoyed me more was Will Arnett, whose sole purpose was to be the comic relief. Shredder, the main villain of the movie is the most generic villain you could find, even Doctor Doom in the last act of Fant4stic wasn’t this roughly put together. The reason was that William Fichtner was going to be him before the casting backlash which resulted in some random faceless guy with no personality being Shredder. William Fichtner was pretty good in the movie but there was no real payoff of his character because of the production change.

Even though Michael Bay produced it, his fingerprints are all over it. The action scenes are fun to watch but they are very Transformers esque and are very over the top. A lot of people have talked about the designs of the turtles, and yes they do look a little badly designed. It’s not so much the body design I have a problem with, it’s that the heads looked a little messy. From the trailer of the sequel, the designs do look better so at least Bay and others are listening to the feedback.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be but it’s by no means a good movie. It does have some fun action scenes but at the same time it felt like a Michael Bay movie with it’s over the top action, annoying humour and a story that’s not very interesting. I don’t think you really need to see the whole movie, the main plus of the film is the action. Everything else is fine or straying into bad territory. The sequel, Out of the Shadows, actually looks pretty good and has potential to be the TMNT movie that fans want. It probably won’t have to try that hard to be better than this movie, this movie wasn’t bad but it felt quite mediocre overall.