Cartoon Dystopia

SNOWPIERCER (B-minus) -  Korean pulpmeister Bong Joon-ho envisions yet another apocalyptic future, this one aboard a perpetually moving train traversing a ruined planet. Its politics is two-dimensional but its excessive violence jumps off the screen, pummeling you.

It's just a few decades into the future, and man's attempt to cure global warming has backfired -- the planet is a frozen tundra unsuitable for humans. The few hundred or so survivors have been stuffed onto that moving train, which is said to circumnavigate the globe once a year. The lower classes live in squalor in the rear car. As you move up among the cars life improves. In the head car is Mr. Wilford (Ed Harris), the benevolent dictator who wears silk robes and dines on steak, while the poor folks live in filth and eat "protein bars" of questionable provenance.

The masses plot an uprising. The one-note Chris Evans, widely known as Captain America, stars as Curtis, the hunky revolutionary who conspires with the wise old Gilliam, portrayed predictably by John Hurt, in almost a parody of his classic roles. Meantime, doing Wilford's dirty work and PR is Tilda Swinton as Mason, sporting a ridiculous set of protruding teeth as she bickers with the riff-raff. Octavia Spencer is given embarrassingly little to do as a poor single mom fretting over her son and allowing the producers to punch their diversity card.

As the freedom fighters slowly make their way forward, they recruit the train's keymaster (Kang-ho Song from Bong's "The Host"), a junkie who does it for the fix that Curtis provides. Horrific battles ensue, featuring crude arms straight out of "Game of Thrones." Soon, all nuance is gone, and this becomes a matter of the viewer surviving the onslaught of gore. The resolution is fairly anti-climactic.

Bong does have a sophisticated visual style, and he works wonders in confined spaces. The technological quirks he tosses in give the film just enough of a hint of plausibility that you coast along with the concept throughout. But the characters are conventional archetypes and the journey is familiar. Those who don't mind the relentless carnage and overacting will probably consider this a minor classic. 

THE LEGO MOVIE (C) -  I can't imagine being assaulted by this on the big screen. 3-D would have killed me. Did parents really subject their children to this attack on the senses? How does one react to such neon candy-colored crack?

This action-packed polemic about tyranny and conformity (while also serving as a 100-minute advertisement for a consumer product aimed at children) is brought to us by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who are on a roll of late with the popular kids -- also writing/directing "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs I & II" and directing "21/22 Jump Street." This one is teeming with that tight clique of somewhat smug semi-funny Thursday night NBC prime-time players: Alison Brie, Nick Offerman, Chris Pratt, Will Forte, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett. They mix in with the familiar frat-boy hipster types: Will Ferrell, Jonah Hill, Channing Tatum, James Franco's brother Dave, Charlie Day ... Will Arnett. Arnett is actually quite amusing as Batman, the raspy-voiced buffoon who dates the heroine WyldeStyle (Banks). Brie has her moments as Unikitty (a Hello Kitty unicorn), but a little of that goes a long way. Ferrell is surprisingly unamusing as President Business. Morgan Freeman has a few good lines as a wise oracle (typecasting or spoof?).

It had its moments. I laughed out loud at just a few frames of an astronaut floating in space while listening to a satellite broadcast on what looked like a transistor radio. When President Business transforms to his alter-ego, Lord Business, he uses elaborate mispronunciations of ordinary household items -- the Fleece-Crested Scepter of Que-Teep (a Q-Tip) and the Sword of Exact-Zero (an X-acto blade), and his henchmen are ominously referred to as Micro Managers. On paper I bet this is quite clever and funny. But the political statement is weak, and it grows tiring after about twenty minutes. The love story is beyond trite. And a mawkish live-action ending, in which the innocent make the evil ones see the error of their ways, is both too cute and too stupid to justify its attempt at heart-string tugging.

The big question is, what audience would appreciate such a violent film (just how many beheadings are there?) written for simpletons? Besides college stoners, I mean.