The only emoji who can do this for him is master hacker Jailbreak ( Anna Faris), who agrees to help him if he will come with her on a journey to the fabled Cloud, where his ability to change expressions could help her get past the impenetrable firewall protecting it. Gene manages to escape Smiler’s clutches and with the help of another outcast emoji, the once-popular Hi-5 ( James Corden), he hits upon a plan to have himself reprogrammed to show only one expression so that he can finally fit in. Discovering his secret and fearing what it could mean for everyone if one emoji seems to be malfunctioning, Smiler ( Maya Rudolph), the always-grinning leader of Textopolis, decides to have Gene wiped out for good. This becomes a problem when his phone’s owner, a 14-year-old boy named Alex struggling to reach out to the girl that he likes, selects Gene for a text he is sending to her-Gene chokes at the last second and coughs up so many expressions that it is impossible to understand what he is supposed to represent. Miller), who is supposed to be a “meh” like his parents ( Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge), is just so darn exuberant that he is unable to stick with just one expression. All emojis are supposed to have only one facial expression but Gene (T.J. The extremely dubious conceit of "The Emoji Movie" is that hidden within the messaging app in our phones is a teeming metropolis known as Textopolis, where all of the emojis live and wait to be called upon by their owners to say what mere words cannot. That is only the first of many problems with this film, a work so completely devoid of wit, style, intelligence or basic entertainment value that it makes that movie based on the Angry Birds app seem like a pure artistic statement by comparison. Now comes “The Emoji Movie,” a film that dares to ask “What goes on in the magical worlds contained within our cell phones?,” a notion that I do not think that anyone has ever pondered for any amount of time outside of those stuck in a focus group at Sony Animation. Since “ Toy Story” became an enormous box-office hit and a beloved modern masterpiece by giving audiences an inspired look at what ordinary toys do when their owners aren’t around, Hollywood has been striving to repeat that seemingly simple formula with a number of animated films that have offered viewers a privileged glimpse at the heretofore unseen existence of everything from the shelves of a grocery store (the execrable “Foodfight!”) to the psyche of a young girl (the stunning “ Inside Out”).
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