Here are some reviews.
The Verge: “This is a movie about how words aren’t cool, but you can still expect a girl to fall at your feet in response to mild wordplay. Please keep up. Or throw whatever device you’re reading this on into the ocean. Send me a postcard; tell me what it’s like to be free.”
Vox: “It’s amazing that we can put a man on the moon but movies like this still somehow get made.”
The A.V. Club: “The ‘plot’ is really an excuse to hop from one app to another; there are stops in the lands of Candy Crush, WeChat, Just Dance, Instagram, Spotify, and (for the kids!) Dropbox.”
Entertainment Weekly: “There is an awareness pulsing through this movie, as it pulses through our own lives, that so much of what once seemed like progress was the opposite of progress, that our dreams of a better tomorrow were always leading us to a miserable today.”
The New York Times: “For a long time, Hollywood has been propagating the idea that the panderingly, trendily idiotic can be made to seem less so, by polishing it up with bright shiny gloss and enlisting engaging talented performers and writers. I can’t be entirely certain of this, but I would say ‘The Emoji Movie’ takes this notion to the outer limits of credibility.”
Vulture: “Not once does this film rise above the level of humor of literally any real-world use of a simple upside-down-face emoji (whose meaning I tend to translate as ‘Wheeee, life is a horrible hall of mirrors and I am powerless to do anything but smile about it.’) If only my review of this film could be an upside-down-face emoji.”
RogerEbert.com: “A work so completely devoid of wit, style, intelligence or basic entertainment value that it makes that movie based on the Angry Birds app seem like a pure artistic statement by comparison.”
Village Voice: “We’re lying if we grown-ups try to pretend that this one’s not on us ... kids didn’t create the pixelated and thoroughly dumbed-down society this movie has been introduced into, like some sort of trippy, multicolored cinematic virus.”