2019, dir. Mike Mitchell/Trisha Gum, Chris Pratt, Elizabeth
Banks: IMDb /
allmovie
The peace of Brickville is shattered by invaders from Duplo.
Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood for this. If what you want
is undemanding entertainment with things that go whoosh and boom…
yeah, but surely you'll still notice when they go so far as to hang a
lampshade on the shortcomings of the plot?
General Mayhem: This guy was a fierce warrior?
Wyldstyle: Okay, well, technically, I did the warrior stuff,
but…
General Mayhem: So you fought, and master built, and kicked butt,
and then the hapless male was the leader.
Wyldstyle: He, uh… Well…
Yeah, that's the way it was. And that's the way it will be again:
Designated Hero Emmett is handed super cosmic power, and does whatever
someone else tells him to do with it. Eventually he listens to someone
who's been on the side of good all along, and yay he's a great hero
again now so the story can end. Meanwhile his girlfriend is tired of
his constant sunny optimism and tells him to grow up a bit, and then
when he does that in the most clichéd possible way she changes her
mind. Women, huh?
And there's rather more live-action than before, and those characters
are even thinner than the plastic ones, especially Maya Rudolph as
Fun-Police Mom.
Visually it's great fun, but it's all in service of this desperately
bland narrative that's keen to have you cheering for the guy who
destroyed the universe because his poor manwy feewings were hurt.
(Someone else fixed it.) And the "Catchy Song" naturally fails to be
at all catchy, or even memorable; "Not
Evil" does a much better
job.
I didn't love the first film but it definitely had its moments. This
felt to me like retread that fails to understand what was good about
the first film, even though it had the same scriptwriters; it's all
too reminiscent of Ralph Breaks the Internet.
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