Gorgeous visuals, cheesy puns ‘Cloudy 2’
The FLDSMDFR lives! It’s not too much of a spoiler to tell you that, because without the FLDSMDFR, more precisely known as the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator, there would hardly be reason for a sequel to the sweet and entertaining 2009 family film “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.”
And if “Cloudy 2,” which ups the zany quotient in the continued adventures of Flint and his foodproducing FLDSMDFR (we just love the name, so we’ll keep saying it) lacks the heart and fresh feel of the original, it almost makes up for it in gorgeous, color-popping visuals and in its most important new creation: the Foodimals. Like we said, almost. But first, what are Foodimals? Your kids probably know already, and pretty soon, they’re gonna be asking for their Foodimals multivitamins. So you’d better educate yourself.
Watermelephants. Bananostriches. Shrimpanzees. Tacodiles. Cheesepiders. Yes, the remnants of FLDSMDFR’s food storm have turned into living things.
“Cloudy 2,” directed by Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn, begins precisely eight minutes after the first movie, with Flint’s Swallow Falls facing a huge cleanup job from that giant storm created by, yup, the FLDSMDFR. Or, in one of the first of the movie’s many, many puns: a disaster “of epic portions.”
Here we have no devious mayor, but a new villain: Chester V, the head of Live Corp., clearly modeled after Steve Jobs and Apple (small kids won’t get this, but I sat next to a 10-year-old who did). Chester (Will Forte) whisks Flint and his friends up to Live Corp. HQ , where aspiring inventors compete to win Chester’s favor. This HQ , which could be Google-inspired as much as Apple, has free caffeine stations (caffeine patches, too), which serve up things like “quinoa lattes,” for an easy grownup laugh.
Your enjoyment will probably depend on your tolerance of those countless food-based puns dreamed up by script writers Erica Rivinoja, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein. Some might find these tiresome, but let’s just note here that this is a kid movie, and KIDS LOVE PUNS. So they laugh at “There’s a leek in the boat.” And they laugh even more the second time.
For the adults, there’s enough to admire in the beautiful visuals and cultural references like “Jurassic Park.” You’ll likely chuckle at the Silicon Valley-type setting called “San Fran Jose.”
“Cloudy With a Chance of