The Lego Ninjago Movie (2017)

The Lego Ninjago Movie exists to move merchandise, and it makes no apology for the arrangement. Twenty-odd playsets, a video game, a soundtrack. The film is a commercial that has learned to tell jokes. Its voice ensemble is unusually diverse, with Jackie Chan, Constance Wu, Ali Wong, Kumail Nanjiani, Michael Peña and Randall Park on the call sheet, and the film never once points at this fact. The casting simply is. Nya holds her own in the fight scenes, and Koko is revealed to have been the warrior-queen Lady Iron Dragon before she settled into motherhood, but both developments arrive as ordinary ensemble mechanics. Nobody delivers a speech about it.

What the film does not contain is nearly as interesting. There is no queerness, no romance beyond a boy's unspoken crush, no engagement with race as a subject, no environmental anxiety, no grievance against the corporation that financed the whole enterprise. Zane is described as robotic, which functions as a running gag about a stiff personality, not as an inquiry into how minds differ. The characters are plastic bricks of identical dimensions, so questions of body image do not arise. There is no body to have an image about. History is not revised because history is not present.

The moral architecture is familiar and gentle. Inner peace, forgiveness, a father and son reconciling after a divorce and several mech battles. Garmadon is a bad parent with four arms and a shark-themed army, and the film reaches for genuine feeling only to trip over a gag on the way there. That instinct serves it well. The lessons land softly, if at all, and the bricks keep selling.