I am not entirely sure why many critics seem to be writing about this as if Robot Chicken wasn’t earlier, funnier, and conjured in a more perfect spirit of the kind of exuberant creative anarchy that the carefully licensed Lego Movie pretends to endorse. I guess they’re swept along in the movie’s silly enthusiasm and spirit of borderline-surreal invention, which do keep it aloft for nearly 80 percent of its running time.

SPOILER TERRITORY:
I was swept along until the film took a sudden, final-reel swandive into a transparently preachy live-action ode to Lego-enabled childhood imagination — a borderline-smarmy attempt to sneak some heavy branding for the world’s most highly capitalized toy company into a kid pic. (It wouldn’t be out of place if it were part of an industrial film made to seduce the masses at a Toy Fair, or rev up the salarymen at a Lego sales meeting.) The film sets up this weird dichotomy between vision-starved adults, who have apparently forsaken the innocent pleasures of youthful experimentation, and fabulously inventive children, who continually bust the mold by linking up Lego blocks in admirably unforeseen combinations. The notion that an adult could take real joy in assembling bricks according to someone else’s blueprint — in appreciating the prodigiousness of someone else’s creative mind — seems to be beyond the film’s own imagining. But what rankles is the literal-minded way the film intrudes on and deconstructs its own fanciful universe — the way it short-circuits the response of anyone who was enjoying the picture as an actual flight of fantasy, rather than a direct endorsement of the way Big Toy thinks we all should play with our dolls.

Also disappointing are the film’s gender politics, which start with the character of WyldStyle, the film’s sole major female role (who functions primarily as one vertex of a love triangle), and end with a nearly preverbal preschool girl who’s into Duplo and destruction. In fact, the film’s idea of playtime is so sexist in its conception that it reaches a kind of apotheosis when Mom, no shit, calls down from the kitchen to her big man and her little man, sequestered in the romanticized cloudcuckooland of their prodigious imaginations, to let them know that she has finished preparing their meals.

Oh, sure, there are some good laughs to be had — but a bad taste lingers. Remember the good old days, when directors were lauded for smuggling subversive content into films that looked at first glance like commercial product? This one is a flattering commercial message disguised as subversion.