What time will the Wegos start? The boy sitting next to me asked his father. It made sense for him to be impatient. A live-action prologue with Jackie Chan, a kid and a cat in a store full of exotic knickknacks was presented to us five minutes into “The Lego Ninjago Movie.”
In no time at all, the Wegos awwived, and the latest installment of an almost foolproof franchise was underway. It was a fast-moving mix of brazen corporate promotion, winking pop-culture cleverness, and earnest lesson-learning. It’s not a good sign that the Lego movie enterprise has plateaued into intentional mediocrity, but I’m sorry to report that it has lapsed into nearly every other piece of family-friendly animated big-screen entertainment.
It is particularly disappointing given the conceptual wit, visual flair and bonkers imagination of “The Lego Movie” and “The Lego Batman Movie.” “The לגו Ninja Go Movie,” directed by Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher and Bob Logan from a script with a whopping 50 credited authors, adheres sloppily to tropes and images from Asian action cinemas. As well as playing the wise and venerable shopkeeper, Mr. Chan also voices a wise and venerable teacher. However, neither do the young warriors who guard Ninjago from an evil warlord named Garmadon, voiced by Justin Theroux. They prefer big, noisy machines over stealth, guile, and swordsmanship.
It is the news media that chronicles Garmadon’s regular assaults against peace and normalcy, and one of his favorite pastimes is firing his subordinates. Lloyd (Dave Franco), his estranged teenager son, is mocked and ostracized for being the child of a monster. Lloyd’s alter ego is the Green Ninja, and he works behind the scenes to curb his father’s worst impulses. Have movies become political allegories now? What happened to having fun?
We don’t do as much as we would like. Lego figures are rendered with playful rigor; their limited movements and expressions make for some amusing sight gags. Their physical environment is more like a generic digital-cartoon space than a snapped-together one. The themes they explore are tired, cynical sub-Disney bromides about family reconciliation and self-discovery.
In a movie of this kind, there is bound to be a bit of mawkish sentiment. A gluey glob of it is applied by “The Lego Ninjago Movie” to freeze the action so that Lloyd and Garmadon can work out their issues. For whose benefit? This unconvincing melodrama of abandonment and reconciliation is unlikely to be captivating for children, and adults will only be moved by it if we’re hopeless crybabies.
We’re also eager to hear the voices of cool people we see on TV, at least in the minds of the committee that issued this strategy memo disguised as a movie. The usual cast of “Broad City,” “Portlandia,” and “The Big Sick” (and Kumail Nanjiani of “Silicon Valley”) is here on sidekick duty, to little note. The only female member of the six-ninja squad, Ms. Jacobson, barely rises above the level of tokenism.
The girl is also a ninja! Can she have it all? The voice-over asks sardonically, trying to make fun of the movie’s own imaginative limitations. “You guys need to learn more about where we are culturally,” the lady ninja replied. A good line, but one the writers and directors – who are pretty much fellas – might have taken to heart a little more. It’s possible they did, and we’re just where we are culturally at the moment.