Still liked it for trying, but it is an extra at the end, not part of the overall being of the film. It has a reasonable try at this but it was a case of leaving it too late, and it hadn't manage to get this aspect to work through the film in the way that it really needed to have done to sell it totally. Towards the end there is a nice development which I thought was pretty clever and well done it also opens the door to bring heart into the film by virtue of making it more than cat poster messages and snappy one-liners. All of this makes it entertaining and the novelty of the Lego is well used to add to the comedy. This is accompanied by lots of frantic action, which is well animated but perhaps just too busy to be fun all the time (often I struggled to really see what was happening amid all the rapid colorful movement – again the type of comment thrown at Transformers but less-so at this). With access to a range of characters and franchises, the film has a lot of fun playing with the Lego brand but also the many other brands and characters that it can draw in this produces a busy film with lots of opportunities for pop culture references and jokes – a lot of which it takes. It is a bare bones plot but the flesh put onto it is actually pretty good. The plot is quite light – a perfectly ordinary construction worker who spends his life following instructions and order, suddenly finds himself declared the Special One by a group called the Master Builders, who are racing to prevent Lord Business from destroying the world as they know it.
Although I try not to pay attention to hype and critical response, it did seem like a positive that the same people sneering at Transformers for being a pumped-up toy commercial, were perfectly in love with the Lego Movie even though it is entirely reasonable to point out that it will do that product absolutely no harm to be literally the building blocks of a bright, colorful film where one of the messages is to be creative and mess around with things.
It was approaching the end of the year when I finally joined everyone else and enjoyed seeing the Lego Movie, a few seasons after it was released.