Movie Breakdown: The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

Pre-Screening Stance:

I love The Lego Movie and I want to be excited about a sequel, but with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller passing the role of director to Mike Mitchell (Trolls, Shrek Forever After, Deuce Bigalow) and only returning as writers/producers, I’m not fully feeling it.

Post-Screening Ramble:

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part is a weird film.  It picks up right where the first one left off (with the arrival of toys crafted by Finn’s younger sister), a bit of action happens, and then the story jumps forward five years.  The boy, Finn (Jadon Sand), is now a pre-teen man that’s into building post-apocalyptic landscapes, and his sibling, Bianca (Brooklynn Prince), is the what he was in the first movie – a kid that just wants to play and create.  Like many brothers and sisters, they’re not the best playmates, so chaos is abound and this causes all sorts of issues for the litany of characters down in the Lego world.  As for said make-believe pals, they’re all back (plus a few new ones) and they’re pretty much how they were in The Lego Movie.  Personally, this is what I believe is the cause of the film’s odd feel.  It doesn’t really play as something new, instead it comes off like a tacked on extension of the first film.  The jokes are largely call-backs, the Everything Is Awesome track gets remixed inside and out, and the characters all do and say exactly what you expect them to.  I can’t say any of these overly familiar items make for a particularly bad experience (if anything, it’s a comfortable one), but overall The Lego Movie 2 just doesn’t pop like its predecessor.  Definitely hard not to wonder if these movies have already grown stale.

Again, The Lego Movie 2 isn’t a bad movie, it just isn’t near as good as the one that came before it.  If you do run out and see it, I certainly recommend that you do so with your expectations firmly in check.

One Last Thought:

There’s a scene in this movie where Tiffany Haddish’s Queen Watevra Wa-Nabi does a little musical number and there isn’t a second of it that doesn’t come off as heavily “inspired” by Tamatoa‘s performance of Shiny in Moana.  It made me strike up a hard side-eye.