Everything is still awesome in Lego world
THE LEGO MOVIE 2: THE SECOND PART
(U, 107mins)
Mike Mitchell
Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Alison Brie, Tiffany Haddish, Nick Offerman
Director: Voices: ALL IS TRUE
(12A, 107 mins)
Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Branagh, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench
Director: Stars: IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK
(15, 119 mins)
Barry Jenkins
KiKi Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Teyonah Parris
Director: Stars:
SPARKS never used to fly when Hollywood got into a bed with a toy maker. But five years ago, both parties were more than satisfied with The Lego Movie, a wildly entertaining family animation that helped spark a run on Danish building bricks.
Now, after banishing memories of flops like Battleship and GI Joe, writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have pulled off another astonishing move.
is a first: a comedy sequel that’s even funnier than the original.
Here the double-edged comedy and surreal flights of fancy pile up from the opening scene. The film picks up the action where the first one left off – with a cutesy character made of Duplo bricks terrifying the plastic citizens of Bricksburg.
A scene set in the real world offers an explanation for this alien invasion. The boy who owns the Lego set has been ordered to play with his little sister. It seems she has been mixing the bricks and applying a sprinkle of girly glitter to his macho world.
After we jump forward five Lego years, Emmet (voiced again by Chris Pratt), Wyldstyle/Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), Unikitty (Alison Brie) and MetalBeard (Nick Offerman) are living in a post-apocalyptic world that looks eerily similar to the last Mad Max movie.
Emmet is still infuriatingly upbeat but everyone else is delivering overblown dialogue while starring moodily into the middle distance. Then an alien character called General Mayhem (Stephanie Beatriz) arrives from a galaxy that is clearly very far, far away (cleverly, the figurine is made on a slightly different scale to the Lego characters).
She has been ordered to take five of them to the Systar System for the wedding of shapeshifting leader Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi (Tiffany Haddish). It turns out that the reluctant groom is Lego Batman (Will Arnett), still brooding, self-obsessed and cracking jokes about poor Ben Affleck.
According to an ancient prophesy, if the worlds are united in matrimony it will spark Ourmomageddon and they will be sent to the dark realm of Stor-age. So Emmet hatches a plan to stop the wedding.
He finds an ally in a new character, “galaxy-defending archaeologist, cowboy and raptor trainer” Rex Dangervest (also voiced by Pratt) who seems to be spoofing his voice artist’s movie star persona.
At this point, we may start wondering whether the self-referential jokes have been stacked a little too high. But whenever the film begins to feel like it might be about to topple in on itself, we’re hit with a sharp one-liner or a witty musical routine.
My favourite sequence involved the
2: The Second Part The Lego Movie
“non-threatening teen vampire” who likes to “talk about feelings” while manning the reception at the gates of the girlie universe of Duplo. “I’m also a DJ on the side,” he tells the terrified visitors. “And I wear women’s jeans.”
The jokes are so densely packed that it’s impossible to catch them all on the first viewing. But I’m pretty sure I spotted a plastic version of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and caught the voice of Bruce Willis. “I spend a lot of time in air ducts,” says a balding Lego man who looks a lot like Die Hard’s John McClane. And stick around for the end credits which look and sound amazing.
I assumed Kenneth Branagh was posing as a comedy version of William Shakespeare on the poster for
After all, that rubbery fake nose and joke shop beard clearly didn’t belong in a serious drama. And surely no one was going to buy 84-year-old Judi Dench as his slightly older wife Anne Hathaway?
The small print at the bottom seemed to confirm it. The film was written by Ben Elton, who penned last year’s Shakespeare TV sitcom Upstart Crow.
It didn’t take me long to realise that I had taken All Is True to be a comedy in error. A surprisingly po-faced drama begins in 1613 when The Globe is destroyed by a fire during a production of Henry VIII (the original title of the history play is All Is True).
A burned-out Shakespeare (Branagh) hangs up his quill and heads for Stratford to spend his retirement with family. He is still mourning the death of his son, Hamnet, and wants one of his two daughters to bear him a male heir capable of carrying on his legacy.
Virginia Woolf once asked what would
All Is True.
have happened if Shakespeare had had a talented sister. Here Elton is asking the same question about one of his daughters. Branagh adds gravitas and a pall of melancholy to the Bard. It is such a compelling performance that I occasionally forgot about his terrible make-up.
Shakespeare buffs will enjoy seeing how a cameo from Ian McKellen is used to explain the so-called “gay sonnets” and how Elton hits on an ingenious explanation for the infamous line in the Bard’s will about a “second best bed” left to Anne.
The rest of us may wonder what happened to the jokes. This engaging but muddled film sags noticeably in the middle and a shot of humour may have pepped it up.
IHOPE “that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass”, a young woman says at the beginning of This is Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne), a young black woman from Harlem who is the heroine of Barry Jenkins’s classy adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel.
Jenkins’s last film was Moonlight, winner of Best Picture Oscar in 2017. This sad but beautiful drama is cut from similar cloth. It’s another time-hopping love story full of racial injustice. The glass appears shortly after we’ve got to know Tish and her big-hearted boyfriend Fonny (Stephan James) who fall in love when Tish is 19 and Fonny is 22.
Tragedy strikes when Fonny is arrested for rape. Tish tells him she is pregnant through the glass of the jail visiting room.
In a different film, the question of Fonny’s guilt would power the tale. But here he is so handsome and so decent that we always know he’s been fitted up by a racist cop.
That’s a strength of the film and a weakness. It is beautifully shot, powerfully acted and heart-breakingly tragic, but the languid pace and loose structure leave it a little unfocused. A touch more grit and maybe a sprinkling of suspense might have made the plot grip a little harder.
Talk. If Beale Street Could