![]() Everything isn’t awesome everything is meta, everything is sitcom. So that’s how the film effectively says, “Big bro and little sis, you can play nice and be yourself and be ‘cool’ all at the same time!” But it tends to say that through the “Please-like-me” characters that you mentioned, rattling off Teen Titans Go!-grade quips and snaps. The light, shadows, spaces and sounds are as carefully considered and modulated here as any passage of The Empire Strikes Back, that most beautifully photographed kiddy space opera. But when our heroes first blasted off into space to reach the “Stairgate” portal, I felt faint traces of The Force. Maybe the John Williams sound-alike orchestral cues had something to do with it, too. The first reader who guesses what it is wins my love. Side note: there’s a specific ingenious technical choice the filmmakers made for all the Lego movies that I won’t go into here, but it provides a kind of visual Autotune that also happened to benefit the first three Mad Maxes. As I said to you earlier, about your quietly mortified reaction during the screening: The Lego Movie 2 has more visual texture, solidity and dreaminess than Mad Max: Fury Road. Whatever Nerf bat this film is trying to beat kids over the head with about gender roles - and toxic masculinity, encroaching puberty, optimism, identity, anxiety and Real Life - I tended to experience like a five year-old: as a light show, a pop-up book, a crib mobile. In that sense, The Lego Movie 2 is standard-issue toothless (or teething, rather) satire with a difference: like its predecessor, it is distinctly gorgeous. Very smart people make these movies, and pop-culturally astute people gobble them up. The mindlessness of your average contemporary mindless entertainment owes more to its visual construction - interchangeable CGI hyperbole and infographic sense of storytelling - than to the content. If I had to write a full Lego Movie 2 review, it would probably go little further than Singer’s note, “This is a very fun movie to look at.” In 2019, we expect a popular family film to have a lot on its mind. Steven Boone (aka Bionicle with a Monocle): I don’t hate it. I’m not immune to Lord and Miller’s meta-reflexive style of humor. But I am not (just) boasting when I say that I had this movie pegged from early on - I wanted to love this movie, especially since I like both Lord and Miller’s 21 Jump Street and the Lord and Rodney Rothman co-scripted Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Granted, I did not anticipate the twist about Chris Pratt (voiced by Pratt) and Rex Dangervest (also Pratt), his grimdark Chris Pratt alter-ego. Oh, so the menacing Duplo aliens are just misunderstood? And evil shape-shifting alien Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi (Tiffany Haddish) - a big target of skepticism for our well-meaning, outspoken heroine Lucy (Elizabeth Banks) - is not really evil? I got all of that after about 30 minutes. I felt like I had already seen the whole movie by the 30-minute mark. And?Įverything in The Lego Movie 2 repeats or barely develops that theme. Simon Abrams (aka Manchego Ninjago) : I take issue with The Lego Movie 2 and The Lego Movie because of their please-like-me jokes, their boring-looking visuals (sorry, man) and their winky-winky stock characters. More specifically, I dislike Lord, Miller, and director Mike Mitchell’s expression of The Lego Movie 2’s biggest idea: grimdark entertainment, like Mad Max: Fury Road, is just as valid as bubblegum pop, like, say, The Lego Movie, because both films are ultimately optimistic. Well, yeah. Box Office: Winter 2019 Revenue Hits 8-Year Low in U.S.
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