Reviewing LEGO: The Adventures of Clutch Powers

[Master Inika]

I'm going to give my interpretation of LEGO: The Adventures of Clutch Powers before The LEGO Movie comes out. I'm trying to review this aware that it's a much less well-funded film than TLM, being direct-to-DVD, and I'll mostly try to compare it to LEGO Atlantis: The Movie and the Hero Factory TV series.

 

 

It opens with Clutch, our hero, searching for a power crystal for LEGO City when his superior tells him to wait for reinforcements. Clutch, however, works alone. Gee, I wonder what lesson Clutch is going to learn in this movie. He fights a rock monster and gets away with a crystal.

 

 

The next part is Clutch driving through town; this scene helps establish the world. It's basically a generic city where everything is made out of LEGO parts, and Clutch is a celebrated hero whom everyone idolizes. The opening drags on a minute or so longer than it has to, I felt like. It's mostly him driving by random people who say things like, "Hey, it's Clutch Powers!" Clutch reaches the LEGO headquarters, where it becomes apparent that LEGO is some sort of global peacekeeping force, and Clutch is one of its agents known as a LEGO Explorer.

 

 

Then, his superior tells him that there was a jailbreak on the prison planet X-4. Now, this is the first real storytelling issue I have with the film. For kids, this might be the first "I work alone" archetype character they encounter, and the dragging scene with him returning to the city is more of a nitpick. But I feel like making it a sci-fi should have been established in that scene of him going around town. That also would have helped make it less repetitive. Like, maybe a starship blasting off in the background or aliens or something. I thought it would just be a normal LEGO city until the sci-fi part was introduces.

 

 

Clutch then meets his new team, which he is less-than-thrilled to be working with: Brick Masterson, "the tough guy," Bernie von Beam, "the nerd," and Peg Mooring, "the female." Because in the LEGO universe, being female is basically a personality trait. I was amused by all the LEGO puns in the names. Clutch's boss is also named Kjeld Playwell, and the scientist who builds their spacecraft is named Artie Fol, or A. Fol for short.

 

 

The next scene is of the four flying through space to the prison planet. Most of it just reinforces the generic archetypes the characters are. Brick is an unintelligent, overconfident macho man, and Bernie spends all his time trying to impress an oblivious Peg. Clutch himself has a more interesting backstory: his father, Rock Powers, was a LEGO Explorer who went missing trying to capture a mysterious antagonist who he symbolized with the letter omega. The distress call from the prison planet also included the omega, so Clutch believes it's the same evil force. This mirrors Indiana Jones' relationship with his father Henry Jones Sr. in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There's an earlier line where he says, "Rock monsters. Why did it have to be rock monsters?" I found that line to be cheap, but Clutch's Indy-based backstory is clever and serves a purpose.

 

 

An evil, terribly out-of-place wizard fights with the team when they reach the planet and escapes with their ship. They build a new one and learn from Kjeld that the wizard, Mallock, comes from the Medieval planet Ashlar. Is the sci-fi was shoehorned in, the knight fantasy was dragged kicking and screaming. Not only does it not make sense, it’s obviously done to advertise sets from a variety of themes. The Power Miners theme in the beginning would have been overlookable if it was the only one, but adding both Space Police and Castle are too much.

 

 

Also, they find the police captain at the prison planet, but they don’t take him with them when they escape. I guess they just left him there alone on an abandoned planet.

 

 

On Ashlar, they find the true king, Prince Varen, and build a battle wagon to confront the wizard. The prince’s secret hideout is guarded by a troll, Hogar, whom Clutch has to defeat in three challenges. The third challenge is a mysterious riddle to which the answer is Clutch’s father. Clutch realizes it looking at his reflection in a river. This was a scene which I found well-done. The troll himself has a meaningful backstory: even though he’s ugly, the king treated him with respect, so after the wizard took over, the troll dedicated himself to protecting the prince.

 

 

Later, Clutch and the prince infiltrate the wizard’s castle as the other three lead the knight army against the skeleton army. The knights are overrun, and in their escape, Brick crashes their wagon. Bernie says it was because they didn’t put a piece in it that he suggested adding earlier. The team begins to fracture after that, which I feel is the best and most natural scene in the movie thus far.

 

 

There’s also a sword that only Prince Varen, as the true king, can use to defeat Mallock. There’s a surprisingly deep moral about fatherhood in the movie. Clutch gets the sword, but Mallock promises to reunite him with his father if he relinquishes it. Varen tells him that his father is with him in spirit, mirroring an earlier scene where Clutch told Varen that to calm his stress about not being a good king. Clutch gives the prince the sword and Varen defeats the wizard, restoring freedom to Ashlar.

 

Back at the LEGO headquarters, Kjeld gives Clutch and his team, now united and “building off each other” their next mission: to catch the second of the three villains who escaped the prison planet. I predict that the implied sequel will never, ever be made.

 

 

I feel kind of bad giving a mixed review to a LEGO movie, since I know the highs LEGO can hit when they really try. Much of the humor and dialog of the film is extremely predictable and formulaic. When the team lands on Ashlar, they touch down in the middle of “Legohenge.” Bernie goes on about how ancient and magnificent it is, but clumsy old Brick accidentally knocks over one of the bricks and it goes down domino-style. Mallock derisively calls Varen “Prince Varen” as they’re sparring. After Varen wins, he says, “That’s King Varen.” When Kjeld congratulates Clutch at the end of the movie, he says, “No, thank the team.” The animation is also unimpressive. The scenes of Clutch driving and the spaceship flying through space seem especially stilted. The setting is all over the place. It’s Power Miners, City, Space Police, and Castle awkwardly forced into one film. This was obviously done to promote those respective themes, which I understand LEGO has to do, but they’re usually so much more subtle about it.

 

 

The positive points are the parts about Clutch and Varen dealing with their lost fathers. Also, even though they mostly fail to go beyond the archetypes they represent, Clutch’s team has some interesting interactions, mostly concentrated after they crash their wagon. The work of the voice actors and actresses is well-done. They took their roles seriously and gave the characters more life than the animation did. Mallock is a rather stereotypical villain, but his henchmen, Skelly and Bones, are sometimes amusing, which I am guilty to say, because their humor is mostly bone-related puns. Still, they have some funny dialog and Looney Toons-style antics. Hogar the Troll is another interesting, meaningful character.

 

 

Compared to LEGO Atlantis: The Movie, Atlantis is the better animation. The animation and voice acting is better, the typical archetypes are kept to a minimum of one each (this movie features two “dumb muscles,” Brick and one of the skeletons, and two “bumbling scientists,” Beam and Artie). Additionally, the goofy humor is much more tolerable because the Atlantis animation is only 20 minutes long.

 

 

In a film, what I’m most concerned about is the characters. Do I sympathize and relate to my protagonist? Do I care if he wins or loses? In the case of LEGO: The Adventures of Clutch Powers, I would say yes. The predictable humor and all-over-the-place setting definitely knock it down a few tiers. So, from one-to-five stars, how would I rank LEGO’s first feature-length theme-secular (if you don’t consider it a Castle film) movie? Two-and-a-half stars out of five. At its high points, somewhat amusing and at its low points mostly not too cringeworthy. I saw it on Netflix, so if you have that service, I recommend it for at least one viewing. Would I pay money for it? If it’s in the bargain bin or something, sure. It’s not worth more than four dollars.

 

 

Well, that’s my review. I’m considering a written analysis series for the Hero Factory TV episodes. Would anyone be interested in reading more reviews in my style? Leave a reply with a question, comment, or anything else you’d like to say. Hope you enjoyed it!

 

[Aanchir]

You did a good job with the review.

 

I personally felt a lot differently about the inclusion of sci-fi and historical fantasy elements. Being a general LEGO movie, not a LEGO City movie, and establishing some sci-fi/fantasy elements in the very beginning with the inclusion of the rock monsters, I think the movie would have been incomplete if it HADN'T touched on the various LEGO "worlds". I do think establishing the fantasy world of Ashlar as another planet is a somewhat less elegant way of doing this than in The LEGO Movie, in which portals connect the various worlds, keeping each theme's genre reasonably intact rather than elevating LEGO Space to be the "glue" that holds the various universes together. But still, I do not think a general LEGO movie would have been complete without a sense of playful anachronism.

 

I liked the characters in the movie a lot, because for me they helped to represent different styles of LEGO play. The scene where Bernie sorts every element by function and then Brick throws the parts together haphazardly was one of my favorite scenes, as it really showed the filmmakers' familiarity with the different ways of playing with LEGO bricks. Bernie's crush on Peg was incredibly cute, and I liked that none of them were one-note characters — even in such a short movie, it was clear that there were multiple facets to each character's personality.

 

This movie was not great by any stretch of the imagination. A lot of people felt it was overloaded with product placement. In contrast, I saw it more as a movie produced on a small budget that was largely limited to using existing assets repurposed from other themes (after all, some of the things in it would make no sense as product placement, like the Castle sets which had been out of production for about two years by the time of the movie's release). However, that does not make it any more admirable. It still demonstrates a lack of the overwhelming creativity that makes this year's new LEGO movie so enticing.

 

The movie told a good story that was truly in the spirit of LEGO play, but some moments were a bit cheesy (like how the incredibly nondescript message "LEGO" was interpreted as a rousing pep talk about how "we build on each other"). As setup for a larger series, like the one-hour Ninjago TV special in 2011, it could have been excellent. As it is, it feels underwhelming as a stand-alone story.

 

The special features, like a lot of LEGO DVDs, were incredibly underwhelming. The animated short was wonderfully silly and had a reprise appearance for the adorable baby rock monster from the beginning, but like the "Metus's Revenge" short from BIONICLE: The Legend Reborn, it didn't offer a lot of substance.

[Master Inika]

Oh, I saw it on Netflix, so I didn't see the DVD short. I also did enjoy the scene with Bernie and Brick's building styles, and I think the romance wasn't as hackneyed as it could have been. Overall, the character are the most enjoyable part of it.