Movie Review - The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

MegaSoulhero Well, I guess Phil Lord and Chris Miller had to screw up eventually. I’m a huge fan of the first Lego Movie and I consider it one of my favorite animated films. I also really loved the Lego Batman Movie. As for Lego Ninjago, that was pretty bad. I was actually looking forward to this sequel because of how great the first one is. So I bought a ticket to see it early and I was kinda let down.

It takes place 5 years after the ending of the first movie where they get invaded by creatures from the planet Duplo. This leads them to living in a post apocalyptic world where everyone except Emmet changes to become more dark and serious. Emmet’s friends get abducted and it’s up to him to save them. Along the way, he meets a guy named Rex Dangervest who helps Emmet save everyone and teaches him how to be tough while the others come across an alien queen, vampires, and Bruce Willis. Let me start with my biggest issue with the movie. One thing that made the first movie so good was its clever and hilarious humor. In the sequel, a lot of the jokes don’t land. Even the audience I was watching it with was silent for the most part. The jokes either drag on for too long or are very forced. I can also often predict what joke they’re gonna go with in certain scenes. Because of this, it made it hard to care about what happens to the characters. They just kept throwing jokes at us and they just weren’t landing for me. There’s one joke that they kept on using involving a banana character who keeps slipping because he’s a banana. They do that same joke multiple times and it never makes me laugh. They also seemed to have dumbed down Emmet so this plot could work. They pretty much threw his development out the window. I mean, he’s still a master builder, but not a very competent one. Then of course is that Rex Dangervest character who is also voiced by Chris Pratt. I think it’s clever that he’s a combination of all of Chris Pratt’s characters, but there’s this twist we find out about him later on that is so obvious and extremely predictable that a 2 year old could figure it out. There is no way anyone can say with a straight face that they didn’t see that twist coming. I even predicted months ago. It’s barely even a twist because of how obvious it is!

As for the other characters, Wyldstyle is still as great as she was in the first movie. She gets some more development. There are things we find out about her. It was kind hinted at in the first movie, but the sequel actually tells us more about it. Unfortunately, some of the old characters are kinda pushed to the side. Batman, Unikitty, Metalbeard, and Benny barely have any impact on the film. They also do that cliché where they meet a suspiciously evil character and she easily convinced them to trust her. I found it hard to believe that these characters would be so quick to trust her. Of course Wyldstyle wasn’t so easily convinced. Which is why she’s still so awesome. Speaking of which, the Queen, voiced by Tiffany Haddish, is absolutely phenomenal. She’s just so entertaining throughout. Her whole gimmick is that she can shapeshift into pretty much anything. This really shows the creativity of the animators. But again, the characters from the previous movies are underused. They completely wasted Batman. He doesn’t do anything even remotely memorable. He’s part of a subplot where he has to marry the queen. He at first doesn’t want to marry her, but then, after a pointless song number, he changes his mind. That makes no sense! And yes, there are songs in this movie. They’re just so terrible. One of them was created in hopes that it will become the next Everything is Awesome, but it really isn’t at that same level. It’s just annoying.

I know it sounds like I hate this film, but there’s one thing that’s keeping me from giving it a low score. And that’s the 3rd act. The 3rd act was actually really good. The jokes are actually really funny, there’s a lot of emotion, the action is very creative, and there’s even a really great message. At that point, I was wondering “what happened?” How come this movie didn’t start getting good until the end? It seems like they saved their best stuff for the ending. I was actually smiling during these parts. By the way, if you weren’t a fan of the live action scenes from the first movie, there’s more of it in the sequel. Except, instead of Will Ferrell, they have Maya Rudolph show up. It’s still the same family, though. These scenes are actually done a lot better here than in the first movie. They really help out to get the movie’s message across. I also love how they took a pretty big cliché and turned the tables on it. I was legitimately not expecting them to go that route. It managed to subvert my expectations better than the Last Jedi did. While the Rex Dangervest twist was so painfully obvious and kinda lame, it was nice to see an actual good twist that most people might not see coming. It’s almost as if an entirely different group of writers took over to finish the rest of the movie because everything else was kinda a mess.

This was one of the most disappointing sequels I’ve ever seen. With Phil Lord and Chris Miller as writers, this should’ve been a lot better than it actually was. With the exception of the 3rd act, the movie is just a bunch of noise and colorful images with very little story. Just like Ralph Breaks the Internet, it’s a mediocre sequel to an amazing film. Hopefully How to Train Your Dragon 3 will be better. I’m seeing that next weekend.

Score: 6/10

Comments

Lord and Miller already screwed up in that Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs sequel.
This movie honestly looks like a disappointment, I think that Warner Bros should just end the Lego Movie film series after this movie. Before it becomes too much of a cash cow. - Drawbox

Lord and Miller seem to not be great at sequels. - iliekpiez