Emoji Movie gets the thumbs down

It goes without saying that not all films are created equal. For example, Danny Dyer's Run For Your Wife is rarely listed alongside The Godfather in the movie-making hall of fame.

However, very few films are so uniformly panned that the reviews themselves become a phenomenon in their own right, gathering more viral momentum than the film itself.

Yet with The Emoji Movie, starring TJ Miller and James Corden, movie critics and analysts are treading new ground, using their platform to express an almost existential disdain for the movie.

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In truth, The Emoji Movie was always doomed to fail. After the summer 2016 announcement of the film by Sony Pictures, media outlets gave the concept a resounding thumbs down.

CinemaBlend pointed out the corporate feel the announcement betrayed, writing: "Sometimes a movie based off an existing intellectual property or concept is announced that makes you wonder, 'Why on Earth was this greenlit?'"

Many also compared its conception to that of 2014's The Lego Movie, which was met with critical acclaim. "Hollywood discovered that something is popular and saw the door 'opened' by The Lego Movie, without realising the amount of talent and skill that went into that picture," wrote Collider.

"The Emoji Movie - the movie about emoji that you never actually wanted" added The Verge, while Esquire was quick to ponder the meaning of it all, with some melodramatic doomsday prophesising thrown in.

"A movie that's little yellow creatures will likely be able to challenge Minions as the most hated animated creations of all time," it wrote. "This is the future of cinema. This is the end of cinema. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whale emoji."

As each teaser trailer emerged, the backlash and grim anticipation grew. Even after veteran actor Patrick Stewart was cast - albeit as the "poo" emoji - the public still winced at every pixel of promotional material.

To compound the film's impending box office doom, the mammoth advertising campaign mounted by Sony came across as poorly thought-through and almost indecipherable:

However, Sony Pictures refused to be cowed, and insisting that the film was set to be the blockbuster hit of 2017. "The fact is this is a family movie and family audiences love everything they have seen so far, and that includes embracing the new trailer," a Sony Pictures spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

On 23 July, its release date finally came around. Yet, rather than the straightforward, no-nonsense critical bloodbath many were expecting, reviewers went a level deeper and took apart the corporate forces that led to the creation of The Emoji Movie.

"The film is irredeemable from the moment you recognise it as a transparent exercise in cashing in on the intense relationship some (make that most) children have with their phones," writes the Daily Mail. "Of course, plenty of films try to cash in on all kinds of relationships, but rarely is it done quite as brazenly as this."

"There is a mumbled, shorthand moral about staying true to yourself in all this, but it is drowned out by the wall-to-wall cynicism that is The Emoji Movie’s entire reason for existing in the first place," adds Vulture. "The film runs through its list of corporate and Zeitgeist awareness obligations in dead-eyed lockstep... It is one of the darkest, most dismaying films I have ever seen."

The Atlantic compared the marketing of the film to the rise of Donald Trump. "I don’t blame The Emoji Movie on President Trump," it writes, "but both are jaw-dropping symptoms of American decline."

Furthermore, critics took aim at the highly misguided target demographic Sony Pictures aimed at, with the New Republic claiming that The Emoji Movie's "most unforgivable sin is that it perpetuates the notion that emojis are childish."

The Independent agrees: "The filmmakers would surely have been much better advised to make a movie aimed at teenagers, one that could tap into the sarcasm, cruelty, boastfulness, narcissism and surreal humour that Emojis can be used to convey."

Yet, while the reviews took on a surprisingly ferocious angle, it's clear that many critics couldn't resist the obvious response: reviews comprised of emojis.

"The Emoji Movie review – a big thumbs down" writes the Guardian, using the appropriate emoji, and describing it as a "[poo emoji] corporate clickbait exercise".

Once all reviews were aggregated by round-up website RottenTomatoes.com, their usually elquoqent critical consensus section was simply replaced with a "do not enter" emoji.

Yet the last word goes to the Daily Telegraph, who stress that in order to truly convey the flaws in The Emoji Movie, emojis themselves simply won't cut it: "How bad is The Emoji Movie? There aren't enough poops in the world."