The Emoji Movie, a new animated film that came to movie theaters in July of 2017, to the shock of nobody, is incredibly flat, humorless, and  dull. With an abysmal 9% rating from Rotten Tomatoes and nothing but bad reviews, The Emoji Movie qualifies as the worst movie of the year.

The Emoji Movie  is nothing but a rip-off of several different movies. Its main characters, Gene and Jailbreak,  are obvious copies of and The Lego Movie and Disney’s Wreck it Ralph. Gene is the clichéd character who cannot fit in and is trying to hard to be normal.  The other main characters, Jailbreak and Highfive, take the roles of the rebel and love interest for the main character and offer comic support. The main characters are so “meh” that making someone sit in a theater to watch them is  just torture.

The movie is basically a 90-minute ad. The whole movie takes viewers through many apps, each of them blatantly advertising. These apps include Dropbox, Instagram, Just Dance, Twitter and Spotify. The characters explain how great each app is and how it works. These “ads” go on for way too long and make the plot more complicated than it needs to be. Viewers are never made aware that these are sponsored product placements. There is nothing wrong with the occasional integration of product placement, but this entire movie is based on them.

Another reason many hate this movie is the fact that it is pandering and incredibly humorless. The movie tries to pander to the teens by offering a relevant adaptation of their lives, but it fails horribly. It portrays teens as stupid and shallow but still expects them to like the movie.

The film’s writing also shows no sense of humor. It relies on dumb, bland jokes that only a two year old would find genuinely funny. There are literally five poop jokes in the first ten minutes of the movie, and they go on till the end.

The movie does have some good features to it though. The animation may not be the best but it was still very cheerful  and brought the world of textopolis to life. The animators worked hard to bring this bland, worthless movie to life and did a good job. There were also some clever moments in the movie such as when Gene confesses his love for Jailbreak or when the old emoji faces are depicted as old people. But these small scenes don’t change an overall negative opinion of the movie.

Despite the movie being terrible, it sadly grossed $211,690,970.  This is $161,690, 970 dollars more than its budget. The negative press it got actually worked to boost its profits. Many huge YouTubers (I hate everything and Jacksfilms) made videos on the movie and made people want to pay to watch the movie just for irony.

The movie is unoriginal, unsatisfactory, and purely bad. Mark this one “Do Not Watch.”