“The Emoji Movie,” released to theaters all across America on July 28, 2017, gained resounding applause and praise on its opening night.

By the way, I’m kidding. This movie is awful and here’s why:

The movie’s plot is as played-out and unoriginal as it gets. The movie starts out with Gene, voiced by T.J. Miller, an emoji who is known as a “meh.” Gene is forced to always be indifferent about everything, sort of how I felt watching this abysmal movie. Gene lives in Textopolis (yes, that really is the name of the place) alongside a myriad of other emojis, such as his best friend Hi-5 (a hand emoji), and Poop, a literal poop emoji voiced by Sir Patrick Stewart. The movie then goes on a by-the-numbers self-discovery adventure where the hero finds out they don’t need to conform to everyone’s whims but rather be their own person… or, emoji.

This movie’s story feels like it was written by a bot with a list of trope boxes that needed to be checked off. Seriously, go watch the movie and see how many tropes you can find. The female hacker protagonist’s motives are also very stereotypical. She’s a strong independent emoji who “don’t need no man,” who is also a princess. The fact that the character is a princess gets even more ridiculous later because in the beginning of the movie, she makes a throwaway joke about princesses calling on birds to help them. When the hacker princess emoji and Gene are in a rough situation and can’t save the day, SHE LITERALLY WHISTLES TO CALL THE TWITTER BIRD AND DEUS EX MACHINAS THEM TO THE CLIMAX! Evidently, the only reason they made the hacker emoji a princess was so they, the writers, had a deus ex machina at the end to save the day because they had written themselves into a wall. Great writing, guys.

Product placement in movies is nothing new. We see it all the time in movies like “Transformers” and “The Fast and The Furious.” But before the “Emoji Movie,” we hadn’t seen it infect animated movies, as it was always frowned upon by companies like Disney and Dreamworks. Writers and directors understood that it could break continuity and pull people out of the experience and immersion. “The Emoji Movie,” however, forgoes this and turns the movie into a 90 minute session of ads. This movie literally has the protagonists jump from app to app, promoting the sponsors along the way. However, this is done WAY too much. The movie has the protagonists play Candy Crush for close to 15 minutes! And the immersion is immediately broken when they jump into a “Just Dance” rip-off.

Now, I can’t be TOO harsh on this movie. After all, “it is just a kid’s movie” But, that argument doesn’t really excuse the movie for being poorly written. The only thing that I honestly liked about the movie was that the animation was crisp, however that’s not much of an achievement when the movie is made by Sony, a company that built itself on designing televisions and video game consoles known for good graphics and visuals.

With all that said, the “Emoji Movie” is, in my opinion, not very good. If you are going to watch this movie, then my advice to you the reader is to get it from a Redbox or video rental store so that you don’t spend too much money on a movie of this caliber.