MOVIE: Playmobil movie targets Lego audience

Paul O’Rourke  

AS summer holidays for Dublin school kids persist, the offerings in your local cinema continue to reflect the younger audience’s preferences.

With films like ‘Toy Story 4’, ‘The Lion King’ and ‘Horrible Histories’ currently showing in theatres, an old toy franchise is also aiming to cut themselves a slice of the billion dollar cinematic pie. 

For those who don’t already know, Playmobil is a German toy company that dates back to the mid 1970s, and is famous for producing a range of small plastic characters with distinctive fingerless hands. Having branched out into the world of video games, television shows, and even theme parks, the company more recently noted, with a degree of jealousy no doubt, the movie success of major rival, Lego. 

And so, almost inevitably, we have ‘Playmobil: The Movie’, a Lego wannabe for sure, and hopefully good enough to keep your kids entertained for at least 90 minutes of what remains of their summer holidays. 

The basic story is that of teenager Marla who is forced to track down her younger brother Charlie after he gets caught in a strange animated world populated with Playmobil characters. 

Simple enough you might say, and if that setup sounds familiar, there are many more movie references you will notice if you venture out to see this particular film. Getting lost in a make believe world isn’t new as a theme (‘Ralph Breaks the Internet’), nor is Marla’s unfulfilled desire to travel the world (‘Up’), not to mention the countless ‘Star Wars’ references, and of course, the similarities with The Lego Movie.

The songs are OK, the animation is OK, the jokes are passable without being especially funny, and all in all this product feels like it might have been designed by the Playmobil board of directors and audit committee. Perfectly acceptable stuff.

Anna Taylor Joy (‘Glass’ and ‘Split’) stars as Marla, along with an interesting voice cast that includes Daniel Radcliffe, Adam Lambert and Meghan Trainor.  

It’s definitely not the worst viewing choice you could make for your youngsters, so we award this child friendly feature a review score of 2.5 tolerable stars.