Exuberantly silly ‘The Angry Birds Movie 2’ flies higher than the first
In the “Angry Birds” video games, you use a slingshot to lob flightless buzzards at wobbly fortresses stacked with snickering green pigs. Some quick mental physics is involved, depending on how carefully you care to estimate the trajectory of each bird and the height of each structure. But the satisfactions of these puzzles are as basic and primal as an explosion in a Michael Bay movie. They have a wondrous conceptual simplicity.
The “Angry Birds” movies, for all their virtues, do not. The first one, released to great commercial success in 2016, pulled off the dubious trick of turning these squawking projectiles into characters, each with its own wisecracks and neuroses. The angriest bird was Red (voiced by Jason Sudeikis), shunned by everyone else for his short fuse and thick eyebrows until he proved himself a hero at heart. It was pretty good fun, all in all, even if some of the gags and misunderstandings felt tacked on. Birds go whoosh, pigs go boom — what is there to misunderstand?
“The Angry Birds Movie 2,” a riotous burst of computer-animated slapstick silliness directed by Thurop Van Orman, further complicates the plot and the character dynamics — gratuitously, but enjoyably. Things are looking up for Red, who is now celebrated rather than ostracized. (He may, however, be ostrich-sized. It’s hard to tell. These things aren’t drawn to scale.) Red is now the beloved hero of Bird Island and the leader of its ongoing prank war with Leonard (Bill Hader) and all the other annoying green oinksters on Pig Island.
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