“PLAYMOBIL” — 11⁄2 stars — Voices of Anya Taylor-Joy, Gabriel Bateman, Jim Gaffigan, Daniel Radcliffe; PG (mild action and rude humor); in general release; running time: 99 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — If you had any doubts as to the quality of 2014’s “The Lego Movie” — or even its admittedly not-as-good sequels and spinoffs — look no further than “Playmobil: The Movie,” an unabashed clone that manages to miss its predecessor’s strong points altogether.
There’s a noble idea at the heart of Lino DiSalvo’s “Playmobil,” the story of an orphaned brother and sister struggling to come together in the aftermath of tragedy. But those good intentions top a too short list of qualities from this B-grade tour of a less celebrated toy line.
The film opens with a live-action sequence that introduces Marla (Anya Taylor-Joy), a recent high school graduate with dreams of traveling the world before heading off to college. Her sunny personality drives a close relationship with her little brother Charlie (Ryan S. Hill), and the two bond over Charlie’s vast collection of Playmobil toys and characters.
But after a song from Marla (incidentally, “Playmobil” is sort of a musical) and a quick exchange with Charlie, “Playmobil” pulls a grating record scratch of a tone shift as a pair of cops show up at the door with news that the kids’ parents just died in a car accident.
Fast forward four years, and Marla has forsaken her dreams of travel and college to take care of Charlie (now played by Gabriel Bateman), who at age 10 is still strangely obsessed with his Playmobil toys. Somehow an argument at home leads the kids to a vast Playmobil display at a toy convention in Manhattan, where Marla and Charlie get sucked into the animated world of the toys.
The bulk of the film takes place in this animated dimension, which has rendered the kids into Playmobil avatars. Charlie is now a superpowered Viking, but Marla is just a Playmobil version of her normal self, albeit with bad hair. Soon after they arrive, the kids are separated and Charlie is abducted by a local baddie named Emperor Maximus (Adam Lambert), who covets the boy’s powers. From here it’s up to Marla to rescue her brother — with a little help from characters like the super spy Rex Dasher (Daniel Radcliffe) and a goofy food truck driver named Del (Jim Gaffigan).
We’ve become accustomed to a world where product placement fills our popular culture and no one believes that the “Lego” movies were made without big sales numbers in mind. But where those efforts were crafted with creativity and bolstered by wit and charm, there’s very little in “Playmobil” to suggest the film isn’t just a convenient tour of the playsets you can find at your local department store toy aisle.
To rescue Charlie, Marla has to fight her way through a range of different set pieces, including a future world, the Old West and a pink-and-purple princess kingdom, among others. “The Lego Movie” did this too, but it did so with a lot more self-conscious savvy, and the story was a commentary on the toys themselves and the culture we built around them, as opposed to a commercial convenience.
There’s a handful of decent gags (Gaffigan is a welcome presence) and a positive message at the story’s heart. But at best, “Playmobil” is the kind of movie you fire up on a streaming service. It’s nowhere near the value of a full ticket price, let alone the cost of taking the whole family out to the movies.
Both adults and kids could enjoy “The Lego Movie” together, but if parents watch “Playmobil: The Movie” with their kids, they’ll probably just zone out and wonder how the toy company could justify such a transparent knockoff.
Rating explained: “Playmobil: The Movie” is rated PG for sequences of animated action violence and some mild adult themes.