‘The Lego Movie 2’ review:
The Lego Movie 2 U cert, 107 min ★★★
Dir Mike Mitchell Starring Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Tiffany Haddish, Charlie Day, Alison Brie, Richard Ayoade (voices), Maya Rudolph
The Lego Movie 2 is a sequel that appears to have lost its predecessor’s awesomeness down the back of the sofa. The brain-buzzing ingenuity of Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s 2014 original has been replaced by a frantic, geargrinding wackiness: this second instalment, which relays the ongoing adventures of Emmet (Chris Pratt), Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett) and friends, feels like it is working 10 times as hard to go half as fast.
Still, it does work hard, and the effort occasionally pays off – never more than in its rip-roaring opening set in the “darker, grittier, more mature” town of Apocalypseburg, a Mad Max-style desert fortress stippled with spikes and rust.
One day, a group of invaders whisk Emmet’s friends to the Systar System, at the command of Queen Watevra Wa’nabi (Tiffany Haddish), a shapeshifting clump of multicoloured bricks whose kingdom is a tweeny-sheeny mishmash of glitter and gauze. Emmet vows to break them out, and finds a willing partner in Rex Dangervest, a strutting swashbuckler also voiced by Pratt, whose assorted heroic personas – space cowboy, raptor wrangler, formerly chubby heart-throb – are all wry riffs on the actor’s most famous live-action roles.
The Lego films have always specialised in meta-humour, but Lord and Miller’s script here bulldozes the fourth wall to crumbs, with jokes about licensing agreements and franchise economics, but the intensive cross-promotion now feels oddly corporate rather than anarchic.
One of the great joys of The Lego Movie – indeed, the twist that had many adults in the audience stifling a sob – was its unveiling of the way Emmet’s adventure had been shaped by human forces far beyond his inch-high perspective. The sequel revives the idea with gusto, bringing two new real-world characters into the mix, a mother and daughter played by Maya Rudolph and The Florida Project’s Brooklynn Prince.
But the family plot is so thickly intertwined with the goings-on in Lego world, the device loses its emotional power, and the overarching moral – which could be summarised as “play together nicely” – was addressed with far more heart and playful inventiveness in another recent Lord and Miller production, Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse. It’s clever, though it falls some way short of inspired.
Of course, half a decade ago, “clever” is the most anyone would have dared hope for from an animated film spun off from a popular toy brand. The Lego Movie spoilt us rotten. Its sequel is the film we probably would have been grateful for if we didn’t know better.
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