The Emoji Movie wants to be a big, noisy adventure, but it never quite figures out what kind of story it is telling. Gene, voiced by T.J. Miller, is a multi-expressional emoji living in Textopolis, a digital city inside a smartphone, and he wants nothing more than to be normal. That single goal should drive a sharp, funny comedy. Instead, the film spends 86 minutes wandering through apps like Candy Crush and Just Dance, chasing a villain named Smiler voiced by Maya Rudolph while its jokes land flat and its plot stalls.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Gene’s Big Problem
Gene’s problem is simple: he can make more than one expression, which makes him an outcast in a world where every emoji is supposed to have only one. His parents, Mel and Mary Meh, voiced by Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge, want him to stay safe and quiet. When Gene gets called into the text center by Smiler, the smiley emoji who runs things, he learns he is a “malfunction” and faces deletion. The chase that follows is meant to build tension, but it plays out as a series of escapes that feel less like a plan and more like filler between set pieces.
“when you think of irrepressible, you think of TJ. But he also has this surprising ability to break your heart”
That quote comes from Tony Leondis, who directed the film and co-wrote it with Eric Siegel and Mike White. Leondis created the part with Miller in mind, and Miller’s improv instincts clearly shaped parts of the script. Yet the film never commits to the humor that quote promises. Instead, it leans on broad physical comedy and repeated references to the movie’s own premise, a trap that traps itself.
The Chase Through Apps
Gene’s journey takes him through a piracy app, Candy Crush, Just Dance and Dropbox, where he meets Jailbreak, voiced by Anna Faris, a hacker emoji who wants to live in the cloud. Hi-5, voiced by James Corden, a once-popular emoji now relegated to the “Loser Lounge,” joins Gene on the trip. The three of them dodge Smiler’s bots, get caught up in Alex’s phone deleting apps, and stumble toward a resolution that never quite arrives.
None of this builds to a satisfying arc. The apps exist mostly as scenery, and the chase itself feels like a checklist of places rather than a narrative engine. The film announces a threat to its world early on — that Alex thinks his phone needs fixing — but it never uses that threat to push the story forward. Instead, it lets the threat sit in the background while the characters run around and fight bots.
A Cast With Nowhere to Go
The voice cast is full of recognizable names. Patrick Stewart voices Poop, Rob Riggle voices Ice Cream, and Sean Hayes voices ‘Devil’ Steven. Christina Aguilera voices Akiko Glitter, Jake T. Austin voices Alex, and Sofía Vergara voices a Flamenco Dancer. That list reads like a promising lineup, and the casting was fast-tracked into production in July 2015 after a bidding war, with the project announced in April 2016. But none of it matters when the writing underneath is thin.
The film’s marketing drew a negative response from the public and an internet backlash before release. That reaction was not entirely misplaced. The movie is trying to sell a joke about emojis being real people, but it never delivers on that idea with enough wit or warmth to earn the audience’s patience.
Where It Falls Short
The Emoji Movie fails because it cannot decide what it wants to be. It borrows the structure of a classic animated adventure — the hero chased across strange lands, the villain chasing him, the friends who help along the way — but it never fills that structure with stakes, urgency or humor that matches its ambition. The chase scenes are busy but pointless. The jokes are obvious. The emotional beats about Gene wanting to fit in land with the force of a shrug.
The film was produced by Sony Pictures Animation and released in the United States on July 28, 2017, through its Columbia Pictures label. It premiered at the Regency Village Theatre on July 23, 2017. Its production time was two years, shorter than most other animated films. None of that matters to the finished product.
The Emoji Movie is a failure of execution. It has a premise that could have worked, a cast that should have been funnier, and a director who said he wanted to make something like Toy Story. What it delivered instead is a film that wastes its ideas on a chase that never resolves and jokes that never land. The movie earns a 1.2/10.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
