The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

Voices of: Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Tiffany Haddish, Stephanie Beatriz, Alison Brie, Will Ferrell, Channing Tatum, Nick Offerman, Will Forte, Jonah Hill, Charlie Day, Maya Rudolph, Cobie Smulders, Richard Ayoade, Jason Momoa, Ike Barinholtz, Ralph Fiennes, Bruce Willis
Directed by: Mike Mitchell
Rating: PG
Genre: Animation, Action, Adventure
2019

Times Seen:
Tim: 1

Summary: Alien invaders threaten the world and Emmet (Chris Pratt), Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), and their friends must band together o stop them.

Review:

Tim: Like many people, I was pleasantly surprised with 2014's The Lego Movie. While it could have felt like a cash grab, it ended up being an entertaining, funny movie that stayed true to the spirit of Legos while also touching on some much deeper themes that resonated with viewers of different ages. It wasn't a perfect movie, but I don't think you could claim it was anything less than a success. It was surprising and unexpected in really good ways.

Five years later, we got The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. It felt like they wisely attempted to follow a similar path. However, whereas the first movie hit the right balance between different elements (humor, heartwarming, action, adventure), this one doesn't quite nail it. I believe that a lot of this comes from director Mike Mitchell, who can't get the same mileage out of this movie, even though original movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller wrote the screenplay for this one, too. This film is absolutely a decent animated movie, but it's missing some of the magic of the original. That's somewhat disappointing.

It felt like the story was unnecessarily convoluted for much of the movie. The script specifically keeps the audience in the dark about a lot of things, but that felt more frustrating than anything. The story does eventually pay this off and it all makes sense in the end, but man, it was difficult to follow for much of the movie. Characters' intentions were very unclear so it was hard to understand their motivations, which brought the quality of the story down significantly. There's a couple of cool twists at the end that showed glimmers of the intelligence that was apparent in the first movie, but the twists themselves are probably over the heads of most younger viewers. They weren't always presented in the most straightforward ways. Watching with average levels of interest, it was a little much. Watching it was like, "So, there's time travel... And I suppose that explains things and pieces of the puzzle are falling into place." It was kind of cool and kind of unnecessarily complicated.

The movie felt like it dipped into the same well a few too many times. "Everything is Awesome" was one of the most catching/annoying highlights from the original film. It's a bit disappointing that we got "Everything's Not Awesome" instead of them coming up with another innovative song that stands on its own. This pretty much sums up most of the movie. Way too many Batman jokes, too much retreading where we've already been before.

The voice cast is solid. Chris Pratt and Elizabeth Banks both do solid jobs yet again. Pratt especially was given a heftier task this time around and more than rises to the occasion. I've never been a huge fan of Will Arnett's Batman, but I suppose he's somewhat entertaining. Tiffany Haddish was okay, although her voice does become grating. The rest of the cast was fairly solid, although it's hard to pick out any real standouts.

I am admittedly a bit down on The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. I do feel like I have good reasons, though. The first movie was entertaining and surprisingly good. Since it's debut in 2014, three years later we got a decent (yet not as good) spin-off in The Lego Batman Movie, that same year was the decent (yet not as good) The Lego Ninjango Movie, and two years later, the decent (yet not as good as the original) The Lego Movie 2. Four films in 5-6 years and three of them didn't rise above decent isn't the best track record. It felt like there was some level of franchise fatigue here, which was aggravating since this was only the second film of the main series. If you want another indicator of this, The Lego Movie 2 made $150 million less at the box office than the original. It made $70 million less than The Lego Batman Movie. That is an indication that something has gone wrong. Audiences didn't come out for this one. Still, if you want to be optimistic about it, 3 decent films and 1 good one isn't the worst, either. It just felt like the Lego franchise could have been much more than this. It'll be interesting to see if Warner does something different due to the vastly underwhelming box office.

Rating 1-10
Tim's Rating: 6.5



If You Enjoyed This Movie, We Recommend: The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie, The Lego Ninjango Movie