‘The Lego Movie 2’ is fun, if rather familiar content
The Arctic is planet Earth at its rawest. The untamed, unforgiving northern expanse of ice and tundra is terrifying in its brutality, austerely beautiful in its isolation. ❚ So, too, is “Arctic,” a survivalist story that mimics its namesake by stripping the genre down to its bare elements. There are no character arcs, no fussy camera work, little in the way of plot and maybe a minute or two’s worth of dialogue. It is simply one man’s determination not to die pitted against nature’s determination to kill him.
‘Arctic’
How do you replicate the first-time magic of the unexpected in a sequel?
You don’t, obviously. “The Lego Movie” (2014) had a lot going for it, not least of which was a vast and enormously funny voice cast that has returned for round two, and a blocky animation style faithful to the product that still pops in a sea of smooth CGI homogeny. But the most powerful weapon in its charm arsenal was that nobody saw it coming.
At the time, nothing seemed like a more crassly corporate translation of a child’s plaything to the big screen – not
‘The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part’
Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Will Arnett, Tiffany Haddish. Great Fair Mike Mitchell.
PG for some rude humor. Bad
Good Bomb
any of the Transformers movies, not “Battleship,” maybe not even “Bratz: The Movie.” How do you build character arcs, a narrative, a living world, out of literal building blocks?
Same way you build anything out of Legos: with a great deal of imagination.
It’s been five years since that revelation, and we’ve since seen “The Lego Batman Movie” and “The Lego Ninjago Movie,” and what was once magic has become rote. “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part” was handicapped from the word go, even with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller returning as producers and screenwriters. In the director’s chair is Mike Mitchell, the man behind the decidedly less inspired children’s toy crossover “Trolls” (2016).
But while it necessarily lacks the joy of discovery the first movie brought, “The Lego Movie 2” is still a breathless romp, landing enough jokes a minute to discourage over-analysis. It’s a good time at the movies, which is all a Lego movie really owes us for the price of admission.
The plot picks up immediately after the first movie, with the heroes of Bricksburg beset by chunky, babyvoiced Duplo blocks, an alien invasion visited on them by the little sister in the human world above. The adorably destructive blocks are mayhem incarnate, laying waste to any semblance of order with a deluge of glitter and stickers. This collision of a young girl’s chaotic and sparkly aesthetic with her aggrieved older brother’s orderly and boyish heroics proves a fateful one.
Skip five years, and our Lego friends are living in barren Apocalypseburg, a Mad Max-esque dystopia where nothing good can thrive without attracting the attention of the Duplo invaders. It’s a grim place filled with flamethrowers and chainsaws, punk-rock cats and sewer babies, and everything is decidedly not awesome.
Tough-as-nails Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) is perfectly suited to this cutthroat new world, but her boyfriend Emmet (Chris Pratt) is still his lovably obtuse goofball self. He proves a liability when gruff but glitter-winged General Mayhem of the Systar System (Stephanie Beatriz) arrives to take our heroes to Queen Watevra (Tiffany Haddish), a charismatic shapeshifter with murky intentions, and perhaps a crush on Batman (Will Arnett).
The plot’s a bit of a chore to explain because the plot itself is a bit of a chore, never quite satisfyingly cohering. That’s in part because of the segmented story structure, which has Emmet, Wyldstyle and Batman off on their own separate adventures for most of the movie before colliding for a climax that tries to pull the same trick as the first movie, tying the events of the animated adventure to emotionally resonant developments in the human world.
The end result isn’t a bad one, but a thoughtful meditation on childhood imagination and gendered play that encourages children to play more selflessly with each other. The message is wholesome. It’s just that we’ve heard this song before.
Speaking of songs, steel yourself for another insidious earworm. This time it’s the irrepressibly inane “Catchy Song,” which repeats the line “This song’s gonna get stuck inside yo’ head” ad nauseam. Like the movie, it’s obvious and overeager, a piece of commercial pop art manufactured within an inch of its life. But it’s also not wrong, and will very much get stuck inside your head.