The Lego Movie 2
Feb. 9th, 2019 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessI saw The Lego Movie 2: the second part last night, and I doubt I’ll laugh as much as the cinema this year, although Hollywood etc are welcome to try to beat it. The film met the sequel challenge by going even more out there. I was laughing fairly helplessly from the reveal of what’s happened to Bricksburg, and by the time we got to a duet involving Batman, I wanted to draw heart shapes in glitter around the film. It also features probably the best over-the-credits song in modern cinema.
I liked, like The Incredibles 2, that it did some course-correcting by bringing in more female characters, and a female point of view – Lucy has more to do. The real-world stuff, which so threw me the first time I saw the first film – although I found it had grown on me when I rewatched The Lego Movie last week – is even more integrated, and I found the sibling stuff more affecting than the father-son stuff. Maya Rudolph is gold, though there’s a cameo people may be talking about more. And they dodged a bullet by limiting Liam Neeson’s role to blink and you’ll miss it.
Just as you’re starting to think they’re over-reliant on ‘Everything is Awesome’, they come up with new songs, which may not have quite the force of ‘EiA’, but they do pre-emptively mock their near-over-reliance on music, and ‘Gotham Dudes’ is a thing of beauty that celebrates Val Kilmer’s lips. But my favourite running gag was the subtitled dinosaurs. And though there are many callbacks, there’s so much new stuff – it’s visually more psychedelic and hello, set in ‘space’.
It made me a little sad that there was no Sky High 2 (same director), but the universe could pay me back and let Miller and Lord work on Animaniacs or even the original Warners cartoon characters. If I wanted that to happen after Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse, I want it so much more now.
I liked, like The Incredibles 2, that it did some course-correcting by bringing in more female characters, and a female point of view – Lucy has more to do. The real-world stuff, which so threw me the first time I saw the first film – although I found it had grown on me when I rewatched The Lego Movie last week – is even more integrated, and I found the sibling stuff more affecting than the father-son stuff. Maya Rudolph is gold, though there’s a cameo people may be talking about more. And they dodged a bullet by limiting Liam Neeson’s role to blink and you’ll miss it.
Just as you’re starting to think they’re over-reliant on ‘Everything is Awesome’, they come up with new songs, which may not have quite the force of ‘EiA’, but they do pre-emptively mock their near-over-reliance on music, and ‘Gotham Dudes’ is a thing of beauty that celebrates Val Kilmer’s lips. But my favourite running gag was the subtitled dinosaurs. And though there are many callbacks, there’s so much new stuff – it’s visually more psychedelic and hello, set in ‘space’.
It made me a little sad that there was no Sky High 2 (same director), but the universe could pay me back and let Miller and Lord work on Animaniacs or even the original Warners cartoon characters. If I wanted that to happen after Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse, I want it so much more now.
