Within the first ten minutes of “Playmobil: The Movie,” two kids sing a cute musical number, find out their parents died in a car accident, and after a flash forward of four years, one attempts to run away. If this feels a bit like storytelling whiplash, it’s because it is — and it’s what we’re getting for the rest of the movie.
An uneven story built to sell toy sets with little to no emotional connectivity, overlaid with generic pop music meant to distract from the mess of a narrative, “Playmobil: The Movie” might have been better off going directly to streaming, as it is best watched running in the background of a playdate for pre-schoolers, buried under the noise of kids’ own imaginations but offering the occasional distraction from a total toddler meltdown.