Have you heard the news? The Emoji Movie is bad, folks! [Match Game voice.] How bad is it?! Well, that’s up to you, if you ever have the guts to go see this failed “brand-into-narrative” attempt, but if you have any common sense, you’d just stay at home and revel in these mean reviews instead.
“In the mock tradition of countless superior Pixar films before it, it’s attempting to sell a sense of childlike wonder and fascination with an ordinary, everyday object: your smartphone. And in doing so, it is one of the darkest, most dismaying films I have ever seen, much less one ostensibly made for children.” — Emily Yoshida, Vulture
“There are five stages of grief in preparing to watch The Emoji Movie. The first is denial that this actually exists. The second is anger that now even storytelling has been reduced to those reductive blobs.” — Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press
“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.” — Tomris Laffly, Time Out
“Please restore my eyes to their factory settings. They have seen The Emoji Movie, a new exercise in soulless branding, aimed primarily at little kids. But where another product-focused flick, The Lego Movie, had cleverness and heart, this thing is a piece of app … Hear that? It’s the end of the world.” — Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post
“The Emoji Movie Is Almost as Bad and Brutally Depressing As Everything Else in 2017.” — David Ehrlich, IndieWire
“If only this smartphone-centric dud, so happy to hawk real-world apps to its audience, could have done the same in its release strategy — coming out via Snapchat, where it would vanish shortly after arrival. But even that wouldn’t be fast enough.” — John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
“The Emoji Movie is a force of insidious evil, a film that feels as if it was dashed off by an uninspired advertising executive … 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.” — Charles Bramesco, The Guardian
“I briefly fell asleep a couple of times, because the film is boldly bad, yes, but also boldly boring.” — Bilge Ebiri, The Village Voice
“The Emoji Movie is so bad, it made us want to yell at strangers on the street … I don’t think I can say anything funny about this, because it makes me want to die.” — Kaitlyn Tiffany and Lizzie Plaugic, the Verge
“A callous cash grab that fully understands what a parent circa 2017 needs to keep the kids contained.” — Bill Gibron, Film Racket
