(Reviewed by ‘The Movie Knight’) The city of Ninjago is a peaceful place. The residents live in relative harmony and even get to wake up every day to Michael Strahan on TV. The only thing that can ruin everyone’s day is when Garmadon (voiced by Justin Theroux) attacks the city to try to take it over. Unfortunately, this happens almost every day. Luckily, the city has the Ninjas to protect it. When these heroes are not fighting their arch-enemy, they are dealing with a much tougher foe, high school.
Of the Ninjas, the one who has it the roughest is the Green Ninja, Lloyd (voiced by Dave Franco). Every student in school stays as far away from him as possible. They won’t even ride on the same side of the bus as him. That’s because everyone knows his father is Garmadon. It’s a tough cross even for Lloyd to bear. However, when an even greater threat comes to Ninjago in the form of a live kitty cat, father and son must team up and maybe, finally, make a bond.
This marks the third Lego animated movie; and, while the other two were fun fares for the entire family, this new one will probably only be enjoyed by children. This is one of those “hard to sit through” pictures adults sometimes have to endure.
Yes, these are all animated Lego characters, but we could still identify with Chris Pratt’s Emmet in The Lego Movie and Will Arnett’s Batman in the Lego Batman Movie earlier this year. You may think a father/son themed movie would let people do the same, but it never materializes. The story flops all over the place. That may be due to the fact that this had six different writers and three co-directors. None of the other ones in the franchise carried that many in either category.
Here is something also surprising; you may think a ninja tale would at least have some fun fight scenes, right? You’d be wrong here too. The animation is great and is something to behold considering many of us grew up playing with Legos and creating adventures with them, but all of the “action” scenes feel stale as we already witnessed similar type of scenes from the previous outings.
Unfortunately, there are not many choices right now in the family film department. The kids are back in school and are now aching to do something on the weekends. We love our children and sometimes have to do things we don’t necessarily enjoy. This is one of them.
1.5 Tiaras