Karmatic kickback.
Right about now, Trump hating actor T.J. Miller must be starting to regret that he burned his bridges behind him when he bad mouthed his former cast members of the hit comedy Silicon Valley when he left that show. Perhaps he thought that he was just so chock full of talent that he would be too big to fail. Well, his newest project, The Emoji Movie, has just been released and it has been universally panned.
Critics hated it so much that for awhile it earned a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (now upgraded slightly to 3%). Although the general concensus is that Miller's movie is totally unfunny, many of the reviews are actually quite entertaining starting with this video review by Chris Stuckmann (Warning: Strong language alert due to movie being so horrible it made reviewer burst out cursing).
Other reviewers hated The Emoji Movie every bit as much as Stuckmann. Among such reviews is this one from Tomris Laffly of of TimeOut:
Stupid, offensive and as substantial as a text message, this toxic piece of kiddie trash isn't worth the pixels.
Disregard that PG rating and keep your children far away from director Tony Leondis’ vile animated faux-comedy. Beneath its trippy surface lurks an insidious philosophy hazardous to impressionable minds. The Emoji Movie openly rolls its eyes at full-fledged thought, legitimizing poor communication skills by cheering on the decay of attention spans. Early on, a character gleefully declares, “Words aren’t cool!” Is that the ideology the screenwriters embraced? It’s a fair question.
Charles Bramesco of The Guardian was also less than enamored with this film:
The Emoji Movie is a force of insidious evil, a film that feels as if it was dashed off by an uninspired advertising executive. The best commercials have a way of making you forget you’re being pitched at, but director Tony Leondis leaves all the notes received from his brand partners in full view. The core conceit apes Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, where a spirited misfit hops between self-contained worlds styled in a single recognisable way. Instead of holidays, however, our hero here jumps from app to app, and the ulterior motive of pumping up download numbers drains every last drop of joy from Leondis’s efforts to enchant.
A viewer leaves The Emoji Movie a colder person, not only angry at the film for being unconscionably bad, but resentful of it for making them feel angry.
One of my favorite reviews came from Roger Moore of Movie Nation for laughing at the artistic demise of T.J. Miller:
And Maya Rudolph, voicing the ever-gargling/always-flossing/compulsive tooth-brushing Smiley Face emoji, gets to do a couple of spit-takes.
But that’s all there is to this comatose cartoon for kids, aka “T.J. Miller’s ticket to oblivion.”
Yeah, T.J. Miller quit a good TV gig because now he’s a LEADING MAN. In, uh…this. But never mind.
With all these thumbs down reviews in mind, let us remember that T.J. Miller stated that The Emoji Movie was an opportunity to push a leftwing agenda:
So this was an opportunity to do something optimistic, positivistic and you know, we have very few weapons in the current administration, and one of them is to target a younger demographic and try and help them understand and adopt progressive values.
Exit question: Will T.J. Miller blame Donald Trump or Jian Yang for all the horrible reviews his movie has received?
