If the prospect of a Postman Pat Movie wasn’t enough, another favourite from your childhood received the cinematic movie adaptation treatment with the release of The Lego Movie in February 2014. Starring Will Ferrell, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman and Jonah Hill it’s gone on to be a big ticket blockbuster boosted by the genius of the very funny trailer below, which gave the film a series of little blocks of excellence stacked together to form and reform into any number of versatile and clever cinematic vehicular contraptions, architectural constructs and elemental features, which looks as amazing as it sounds.
Release date
Building on the success of the brilliantly tongue-in-cheek Lego computer games series, the movie is a stop-motion animated comedy with a great style that’s sort of reminiscent of Aardman Animations‘ epic Morph-like efforts. The film had its release date on the 14th February 2014 in the UK, following on from the US release on the 7th Feb. It went on to be released on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download on the 21st July 2014. It also came out on Blu-ray 3D on the same date, which is where it looks its best with so much impressive visuals in the movie.
Story
The story follows a little unknown Lego character called Emmet, played by Chris Pratt (AKA Andy from Parks and Recreation), who finds himself at the centre of a dastardly plot to bring the Lego universe screeching to a halt. When the nefarious presence of President Business, voiced by the equally villainous Will Ferrell (Anchorman: The Legend Continues), decides, for some inexplicably abominable reason, that he’s going to ruin it for everyone by gluing all of the pieces together, Emmet gets mistaken for Lego’s fabled saviour, The Special, and suddenly he has to become the hero that everyone needs him to be.
With shades in the storyline of the equally genius Lego City Undercover, Emmet must go head-to-head with the super villain behind the potential glue attack plot and take him down piece by piece with the help of his rag tag team and their might, magic and superpowers, despite not really understanding his role in the whole saga, or what to do in general.
Cast
In addition to Pratt and Ferrell, the film cast also includes Liam Neeson (A-Team Movie), who will be adding to the story as Bad Cop, Lord Business’ enforcer general, along with Morgan Freeman (Now You See Me) as the wizardly Vitruvius and Jonah Hill is set to play the Green Lantern. The big ticket names are boosted by the cult comedy figures of Nick Offerman, also of Parks and Recreation fame, as the pirate Metalbeard and Will Arnett (Blades of Glory) as Batman, plus the over-sized tones of Channing Tatum (21 Jump Street Movie) as the Lego incarnation of Superman.
The sultry squared off curves of Elizabeth Banks (Hunger Games) have also been cast as Wyldstyle, Emmet’s love interest, along with Cobie Smulders (The Avengers) as Wonder Woman. Alison Brie, who went on to star alongside Will Ferrell in comedy Get Hard, plays Princess Unikitty, and Charlie Day (Pacific Rim) plays Benny, the 1980s spaceman that we will all have owned at some point in our lives.
Production
Directed and co-written by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2), The Lego Movie was the much needed big screen outing for the little Dutch blocks. The existing success of the computer games lent a lot to the production of the movie with some brilliant dialogue to go with the stop motion animation brilliance.
If the film wasn’t epic enough, it was also turned into a computer game to add to the impressive list of previous Lego games, which have already taken in Star Wars, Harry Potter and Indiana Jones. Released alongside the film in February 2014, The Lego Movie Computer Game is available on Xbox 360, Xbox ONE, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Wii U, PC, PSVita and Nintendo 3DS. However, the game hasn’t gone on to live up to the genius of its predecessors or the movie itself.
Review
There are a lot of positives to The Lego Movie with its impressive stop-motion animation, great comedy cast and ridiculously funny storyline, but it doesn’t quite live up to all of our expectations. It builds well, but sort of goes off the boil a little later on in the movie as the real world starts to overlap with Lego City, crushing the fantastical nature of it all a bit. However, that doesn’t take away from the fast paced action of the rest of the movie. Read our full review for more details.
