When challenged by visitors from outer space, the Lego people get together to choose a leader. Lego Batman (with the now famous husky Christian Vale delivery) demands that it be him because ‘they have made nine movies about me, with three others in various stages of development’. Later on, presented with a false ending, a character says ‘Oh no, we’re not going to do a sad song as we fade to black, are we?’ That’s the sort of ‘knowing’ dialogue you get in cartoons these days and, for the life of me, I have no idea if the kids get it. But for mine, it’s too cute by half. Broadly speaking, this movie is like nothing so much as a bad acid trip, a blur of lurid colour rushing headlong, at warp speed, from one confusing mini-crisis to the next, with a g’zillion pop-culture references thrown into the blender just to mess with the head of any grownup watching. And, if that weren’t enough, just when you think you’ve got a handle on what’s been going on, there is a contorted time-travel sequence thrown in to explain how the good guy evolved from the bad guy – or was it the other way around? Gawd knows how it all impacted on the tiny brains of its target audience. It is not entirely without merit, though. For starters, it challenges the old paradigm that weird looking robot types from other planets have necessarily arrived on Earth to smash our civilisation. It is an attack on such negativity and is to be praised for its promotion of the idea of embracing the ‘other’. Also for its message that it is okay to not be cool. Otherwise, it is a dog’s breakfast. The little boy sitting next to me spent half the time playing a game on his i-Thingy and at the end a couple of in-between girls danced to the soundtrack as they left the cinema. ‘That was such fun,’ one of them said. I’ll take her word for it.
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