Mike Mitchell | Dr. Grob's Animation Review

Director: Mike Mitchell
Release date: February 2, 2019
Rating: ★★★
Review:

One of the surprises of 2014 was ‘The Lego Movie’, a surprisingly funny and sophisticated movie, making clever use of the source material, and transcending by far the product placement it actually was. Its huge success spawned the equally great ‘The Lego Batman Movie’ and the much weaker ‘The Lego Ninjago Movie’ (both from 2017), but one had to wait for five years for the true sequel: The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part.

This second movie immediately starts with a new threat to Bricksburg, the city in which Emmett lives, this time from the planet Duplo. In a toddler’s voice the new arrivals claim: “We are from the Planet Duplo, we are here to destroy you”. After some mayhem we jump to five years later, in which Bricksburg has apparently been destroyed and rebuilt as ‘Apocalypseburg’, a Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic world in which according to his girlfriend Lucy there’s no place anymore for niceness and optimism, although Emmett is still full of these things, despite having nightmares of “Armamageddon” (sic).

To make matters worse, a new, almost indestructible alien arrives with the name of General Mayhem, messenger of the shape-shifting Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi from the “Systar System”. What follows is another adventure full of references to other movies (e.g. The Wizard of Oz), which takes place both in the LEGO world and in live action, and in which Emmett meets a though guy called Rex Dangervest, who teach Emmett to grow up, or does he?

Unfortunately, this movie strives too hard to play a similar trick to the LEGO world as the first film, but it does all too obviously so. For example, we could see the origin of ‘Systar system’ from miles away. A huge talent like Maya Rudolph is wasted on the live action scenes, which remain formulaic and unspontaneous. The film’s message, too, is brought right in your face and lacks all the subtleties of the first film. There are some nice touches (for example, Bruce Willis playing a Lego version of himself, some nice 2D animation and a couple of pleasant songs), but overall the film never transcends mediocrity, despite all the evident effort. Thus one must conclude that after two films most of the inspiration for LEGO movies had died out.

Watch the trailer for ‘The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part’ yourself and tell me what you think: