The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

The first Lego movie was surprisingly good, despite its bizarre premise.

This sequel, while not as great as the first film, managed to be a fun follow-up.

Mike Mitchell directed plenty of bad movies in the past ( Such as Deuce Bigalow, Sky High and the third part of Alvin and the Chipmunks) but this is (for me, at least) the best thing he had ever done.

Shame the movie wasn't very succesful, since these Lego movies were charming and fun. In terms of quality it was much better and not as dissapointing as "Ralph Breaks the Internet".

Father forces Finn to play with his sister Bianca. Everything is not so awesome with the arrival of her Duplo aliens. It's five years later and only Emmet continues to see everything is awesome. The world is an apocalyptic H.E. double hockey sticks. When Lucy and others are kidnapped by the aliens, Emmet finally see that everything is not awesome. He goes to rescue her and encounters action adventurer Rex Dangervest.

This should be the Third Part. Let me explain. When the movie opens with the introduction of the sister, I figured out the story line of this sequel. Mostly that's what this is except it unnecessarily advances five years. It should have stayed in the beginning. Bianca kidnaps Finn's figures and force them to have a tea party. Sibling rivalry ensues until everything is awesome again. The Armamageddon and storage bin premise gets into a different aspect which needs its own movie. The kids pushed to give up Lego should happen in part three. I still love the characters, the animation, the concept, and the joy of it all. It's still fun. If it doesn't have five years later, everything would be awesome.

Personally, I didn't go see this movie with very high expectations. Because, whilst the first Lego Movie could work with the fact that the audience wasn't aware of the origins of the movie's story (this origin being a child's imagination), this movie had to work with an audience aware of this origin. The movie accepts this and integrates scene's with real actors in the movie. This, luckily, isn't done to an extend where it would be annoying and distracting from the story being portrayed with Lego bricks. It does, however, try to replace the reveal of the first movie, with another reveal. Sadly, this reveal isn't even close to being on the same level as the reveal of the first movie. It turns out to be a bit cliché, which I felt a bit disappointed about. Once again, the filmmakers have some great references to other franchises. These references make for some great laughs. The jokes in this movie are simple and not too hard to understand, but aren't childish. This makes the movie a fun ride for child, teenager and adult. As a standalone movie, I feel it lacks world- and character-building. The movie throws characters at you, without (re-)explaining their origins to you. I feel like you are expected to have seen the first movie, because of this. This movie overall does a really good job for people looking for a fun ride. It is far from a bad movie, but there were some possibility's for it to be a better one.

I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what it is, but this film is severely lacking in something the first one mastered.

Let's start with the easy stuff. There are way too many references and bad puns. Some reviewers would call these references "jokes the adults can understand", and while that is true, they aren't funny. They're just kind of there. They are references that exist for you to say "I get that". There is no "ha" preceding that. Yes, the original also had references and bad puns, but they were used well and there weren't nearly as many.

The first LEGO movie was very self aware, but it had a soul that really seemed to care about what it was saying. The second LEGO movie was so self aware that it was very difficult to take seriously.

There was an obvious message about how growing up should be about learning to work with different people, but it kind of fell flat beneath the veil of "play with others even if you don't like how they play". It honestly made me a little angry. Maybe it wasn't intentional, but the film seemed to suggest that traditionally masculine things are incapable of being used in an imaginative way. I couldn't help but feel a pinch of modern social politics biting for my throat.

The first film felt very apolitical, and I believe that's fitting for a film about a franchise of toys that cradled our imaginations before we cared about politics. This film certainly didn't "ruin my childhood" by any means, but it was a disappointment.

The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part-written by this decade's legit greatest animated movie screenwriters, Chris Miller and Phil Lord (who make most of Disney's recent attributes seem like child's play),-comes off as a passably tolerable, vibrantly decorated childrens' feature that later on blossoms itself into a flamingly witty childrens' AND adults' feature that's bound to electrify the little ones while maybe even stuffing the parents with un-toughening amounts of misty-eyed, raw emotion.

So a little background on my experience with the first one. Most people seem to have deemed it as "one of the best animated movies of the decade" back in 2014. I'm not messing around though when I say that I wholeheartedly think that The LEGO Movie IS the best animated movie of the decade! To this day, I view it as the most unexpectedly "awesome" movie I've ever witnessed in my entire life. So as prophesied, I was pleading for this sequel to live up to its predecessor-despite disliking the watery trailers/teaser trailers/teaser teaser trailers/whatever configuration of a trailer I left out-and not bail-out like Hollywood's most popular, trivial, hop-scotch prequel/sequel/spinoff cash grabs.

For the first half of this movie, I can't lie, I was getting a tad concerned that this movie was going to suffer from major sequelitis due to its awfully turbo, too-meta-for-it's-own-good formula-that might I add, has become quite established already since we've seen this recipe fabricated more productively in three other LEGO movies. This mundane scheme appeared to be leading this movie off into oblivion. But, once the film gets kicking, it GETS kicking. The nucleus of this film starts to reveal itself as an emulate of the original LEGO Movie, thanks to its deftly kiddie-like version of a Christopher Nolan screenplay.

The Second Part decides to traverse off into another domain of family morals that sharply resonates as another clever parallel between the real world and the LEGO world that had me, by fair means, moved. Additionally, there are boatloads of themes that are acutely wholesome-although, slightly trite-that kids can blissfully digest. Also, there are some good, good twists in here which ultimately, sustains the LCU's (LEGO Cinematic Universe's) streak of surprises.

Yes, it's not quite as authoritative or proficient as the original but, gosh-darn it, I can't deny that I was meticulously spellbinded by this rib-tickling sequel. Everything is totally not not awesome this time around. (Verdict: B-)