The Lego Ninjago Movie

After "The Lego Batman" movie, which was okay, I wasn't too keen on seeing this film. I had never even heard of the Lego Ninjago toy set. Upon watching the film, it is apparent that the Lego Movie franchise has lost its luster. The style of humor is no longer fresh as it was back in 2014 and even the original film is not as good as your first experience. Dramatic story moments work the best when contrasted with sincere humor. The lack of originality made it hard to accept the dramatic scenes with full sincerity. That however is not the biggest flaw of this movie.

When you adapt something for the movie screen, you have to please the fans of the original source material but also gain a new fan base to be truly successful. This movie unfortunately seems to abandon any attempt at winning new fans. The opening news sequence had me in the dark and unable to appreciate the characters and premise. I felt as a person new to Lego Ninjago that I was being ignored as a moviegoer. The live action sequences, unlike in "The Lego Movie", felt completely unnecessary. If you can ever remove the framing device from the story of the film and not lose anything meaningful in the process then the framing device is unneeded. Getting back to the style of humor in this franchise, it was original when used on "The Lego Movie". In this third film, I got too tired after awhile to keep up with all the faced-paced gags. Some of the jokes also felt cliché. It is possible for a cliché joke to be funny but among other things, you have to know when to stop. Garmadon expressing every regret he has that motivates him to attack Ninjago except his son was milked so much that the only funny part of that gag was the use of music. The best joke in the whole movie was Zane likening the secret ninja force to the Beatles. Other parts of the animated film that caught my attention include the cinematography for Garmadon's accidental birthday phone call. That looked really good. The first and only time I felt genuine heart in "The Lego Ninjago Movie" was when Koko confronts Garmadon during his party. As a fun fact, the fight scenes were choreographed in live action before being animated. I recognized only a few names on the cast list such as Dave Franco, Michael Pena and of course Jackie Chan. Franco apparently got emotional during the recording of some of the dramatic scenes but it is a pity that emotion wasn't shared by all working on this show.

While watching this movie, I thought of a quote from "Jurassic Park" that can apply to many films that fail to succeed financially or critically. "The Lego Ninjago Movie" made its money back and got satisfaction from over half of critics but "it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it." It is true that the geniuses of "The Lego Movie" acted as producers but the long lists of directors and writers on this movie tell me that there was a shortage of passion amongst them. I know one of the additional editors on the film and I know his passion level for this project was high so I kind of wish he was in charge. "The Lego Ninjago Movie" failed to attract people unfamiliar with the source material and fell short on originality. To achieve sincere drama in a movie, it must be contrasted with some original humor and that is another shortcoming. I must mention that I saw clips of this movie and the ending before I saw the whole film in its entirety so I feel that my opinion of this film may be invalid.

3 Stars out of 5