The most honest stretch of the movie comes about halfway through: an extended riff about one of the Teen Titans pooping in a prop toilet (yes, they’re on a movie set). I don’t want to think about a seven-year-old kid tracking the second week returns of Infinity War or knowing that Green Lantern was a bomb. Then again, a lot of the jokes are about other superhero movies and their reputation and box office performance. Maybe I’m being optimistic, but I have to imagine that the majority of this self-referential humor is completely lost on the young kids in the audience. If you’ve seen Deadpool you know the frequency this is operating on. It’s hardly there anyway: the Teen Titans are salty that they haven’t gotten their own movie, and would you look at that, their film debut is this watered down Charlie Kaufman Adaptation riff about how and why they can’t or don’t deserve to have a movie made about them. I’m not going to summarize the plot of this movie, since it doesn’t matter. It was only a notch less horrifying than those auto-generated YouTube videos of random cartoon characters swearing and killing each other (I recommend this article on the subject. Seeing the same tact applied to a movie aimed at children below the age of 10 was… bizarre, to say the least. But the obvious model for this movie is Deadpool, an R-rated (and a hard R) action/comedy sleeper hit full of extreme violence, “adult language,” drug use, nudity, sex, and perhaps most importantly, a constant wink at the audience, breaking the fourth wall with abandon, bringing its jaded and knowing audience closer by letting them in on the joke, reveling in its stupidity and uselessness. But The Emoji Movie confronted and addressed our dependence on smartphones and had a very compelling original story and universe that could’ve come from a Philip K. Watching it, I was reminded of one aspect of The Emoji Movie: the punishingly vapid and insincere surface material ostensibly aimed at young children. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is not an earnest, po-faced story of struggle, despair, and sorrow like the Batman movies: it’s a self-deprecating, tautological, endlessly self-referential movie that is constantly winking at the audience and operating way above the target demographic’s-children below the age of 10-heads. Please, God.īut Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is somehow more interesting, revealing and honest about the glut of superhero movies always out now than any of the huge tentpole marquee movies like Wonder Woman or Ant-Man and the Wasp. I’ll take anything other than another superhero or sci-fi/fantasy/action franchise sequel. I still have a soft spot for Spider-Man but as I wrote a couple of days ago, superhero movies are clogging up multiplexes year-round now and hogging enormous amounts of money that could be going to… anything else. There’s Robin, Raven, Starfire, Cyborg, and Beast Boy. They’re superheroes but they’re kids, young teenagers I guess. I didn’t know this movie existed until the day I saw it, but I do remember watching the show Teen Titans when I was very young. 88 minutes (don’t worry, no Neo-Nazi connection there… I think). Before I start, let me clarify that I’ve no idea how or why I ended up seeing this movie, but I did. I have things to take care of, and this is the first item on the list. I’m not sure if I have food poisoning, the flu, or just severe nerves.
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