Everything is awesome again
The relentlessly funny The Lego Movie 2 dials up the wackiness to 11.
The Lego Movie 2: the Second Part (★★★★✩) Director: Mike Mitchell
Voice cast: Chris Pratt, elizabeth banks, Will arnett, Charlie day, alison brie, Nick Offerman, Will Ferrell, tiffany Haddish, Stephanie beatriz, Maya rudolph
THE first Lego Movie was awesome. Is the second one just as awesome? You bet it is, and probably, er, awesomer.
Set five years after the events of the first movie, the nice, perfectly organised city of Bricksburg has now been turned into a dystopian wasteland called Apocalypseburg, after being attacked repeatedly by aliens from outer space, the Duplos.
Everyone in the city, including Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), Unikitty (Alison Brie), Bennt the spaceman (Charlie Day) and Metalbeard (Nick Offerman), have been forced to adapt and toughen up ... everyone except Emmet (Chris Pratt), who still thinks everything is awesome, even when it’s not.
Then one day, a strange Lego Friend named General Sweet Mayhem (Stephanie Beatriz) shows up in a spaceship (SPACESHIP! SPACESHIP!), kidnaps Wyldstyle, Batman, Benny, Metalbeard and Unikitty, and brings them back to face Queen Watevra Wanabi (Tiffany Haddish) of the Systar System. It is now up to Emmet to venture into space and save his friends, with the help of a tough stranger called Rex Dangervest (also voiced by Pratt).
Trust me, that is all you want to know about the plot (which is already in the trailer anyway). Because what comes next is such a wild, crazy, relentlessly funny ride that you’ll want to go in blind, and without expectations.
Thanks to the already established animation/live-action set-up of the first film, director Mike Mitchell gets to dial up the wackiness in The Lego Movie 2 to 11 (times 2), cutting loose with a rapid-fire repertoire of jokes, visual gags, and references of everything from Lego’s own products to movies like Die Hard, Mad Max ,andof course, Batman.
Heck, even Rex Dangervest is an amalgam of all of Pratt’s past roles, from Jurassic
World to Guardians Of The Galaxy.
And then there are the songs, a playlist that consists of earworms that somehow manage to pull off the trick of being silly and smart at the same time, as well as clever rehashes of the first movie’s Everything Is
Awesome. It also includes a stupidly catchy song titled, well, Catchy Song that outright claims that “this song’s going to get stuck inside your head” (and trust me, it will).
But it’s not just about the manic madness here. The director also takes the opportunity to explore not just the different styles and categories of Lego, but also the dynamics of Lego building within a family, and the different ways different people play with Lego.
To say more would be giving away the story, but trust me when I say that if you grew up playing with Lego, this will definitely jog some nostalgic memories.
Ironically for a movie based on structural building block toys, the Lego movies seem to
work best when things are not so structured.
The Lego Movie was an unexpectedly original creative riot, while the madcap spin-off
The Lego Batman Movie was arguably one of the best (and funniest) Batman movies ever made.
The Lego Ninjago Movie, however, barely registered a blip on the awesome radar, largely because of a slightly rigid story that didn’t seem to factor in the wildly creative “whatever you want it to be” nature of Lego.
No, with Lego movies, it seems that the more incomprehensibly wacky things get, the higher the awesome meter goes. And The
Lego Movie 2 passes the test with flying coloured bricks.