The LEGO Ninjago Movie (2017)
Six young ninjas Lloyd, Jay, Kai, Cole, Zane and Nya
are tasked with defending their island home, called Ninjago. By night,
they're gifted warriors, using their skills and awesome fleet of ...
Six young ninjas Lloyd, Jay, Kai, Cole, Zane and Nya are tasked with
defending their island home, called Ninjago. By night, they're gifted
warriors, using their skills and awesome fleet of vehicles to fight
villains and monsters. By day, they're ordinary teens struggling against
their greatest enemy: high school.
Language:
EnglishRelease Date:
27 September 2017 (Philippines) See more »Also Known As:
A LEGO Ninjago: Film See more »Company Credits
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Color:
ColorAspect Ratio:
2.35 : 1Did You Know?
Trivia
The plot will diverge from the TV series.The toy-branded TV series jumps to the big screen in Warner Bros.' third Lego movie.
The product of three credited directors, six credited screenwriters,
five editors and one executive producer who helmed two of the most
uninspired trilogy enders in recent memory (Brett Ratner, of X-Men: The Last Stand and Red Dragon), The Lego Ninjago Movie is,
finally, more or less the kind of advertainment observers expected from
the first big-screen adventure featuring Lego toys. A perfectly
adequate family film for kids who love watching things they've seen many
times before (which is to say, most kids), it offers plenty of chuckles
for their parents but nothing approaching the glee of that first Lego Movie.
In a live-action framing device, the picture opens like a Gremlins
knockoff, with a young boy wandering into a mysterious Chinatown curio
store. The shopkeeper, Jackie Chan, sees the kid's beat-up Lego action
figure and takes pity on him, transforming "Lloyd" into a ninja with
some slight of hand. He then pulls a carved-wood figurine out from a
cabinet (this one a wizened martial-arts master) and starts spinning a
yarn about "the story of Ninjago."
Older viewers who still associate Legos with basic-shape bricks that
can be used to build anything a child imagines may not know that Ninjago
is a vast empire of branded kits, each designed to build a specific
element of a world depicted in a TV series of the same name. Ninjago is,
in other words, the kind of imagination-inhibiting toy that represented
everything dumb and oppressive in 2014's The Lego Movie. (And from which that year's self-serving Beyond the Brick: A Lego Brickumentary suggested, dishonestly, the company was moving away.)
Ninjago is a strange island-city where elements of Chinese and
Japanese pop culture combine to create an environment populated mostly
by white people. (Lego humans tend to share a common, unidentifiable
skin tone, but of the top-billed actors voicing these characters, only
Chan comes from China or Japan.) Here, civilization faces constant
threat from Lord Garmadon (Justin Theroux), a villain who lives in a
volcano and wreaks havoc periodically.
The aforementioned Lloyd (Dave Franco, often charming in live action
but generic here) is Garmadon's estranged son and therefore a pariah in
Ninjago. The only people who'll have anything to do with him are the
five friends who secretly form a superhero team with him: They're Power
Ranger-like warriors who do battle with Garmadon in giant robo-mech
suits. What they have to do with ninjas is anyone's guess, and — beyond
the fact that one is a girl and one is a robot — the script doesn't
bother giving any of them (aside from Lloyd) much of a personality.
The ninjas' spiritual leader is Master Wu (Chan), whose secret stash
of gear includes one Ultimate Weapon. After the latest clash between
Garmadon and the ninjas fails to destroy the bad guy (battle scenes here
are epic but so busy in their design they become a blur), Lloyd decides
to steal this mysterious weapon and use it against dear old Dad.
Like The Lego Movie's Kragle, the Ultimate Weapon turns out
to be a common household object, a key-chain laser pointer. How this
device unleashes its destructive power is surprising and belly
laugh-worthy, which of course means it is spoiled by the film's
trailers. Suffice it to say that Lloyd unwittingly causes more harm to
Ninjago than his father ever did. Now he and his buddies must go on a
dangerous quest to find the Ultimate Ultimate Weapon.
Garmadon decides to help them, for reasons that will likely be lost
on viewers but make perfect sense to any hack screenwriters in the
audience: Father and son must, of course, be forced to bond during their
travails and reconcile in the end.
Readers detecting a vaguely Skywalkerian theme will observe many Star Wars
references here, along with plenty of borrowings from other fantasy
adventures. Though these lack the clever, self-aware quality of the
external references in The Lego Movie, they're inoffensive and
generally effective — up until the picture's "the power is inside of
you" climax, at which point they may prompt some eye-rolling. The
inevitable heart-to-heart between the two Garmadons, Lloyd and Lord, is
more sappy than satisfying — despite the novelty of its setting, which
may have some young kids rolling in the aisles.
Final rating: 5/10 for the genre and 5/10 overall, Lego is Lego, it is fun, it is exciting to play with it, but the movie this time is just average.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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