द लेगो मूवी 2: द सेकंड पार्ट

I got roped into seeing this with my friend and our kids, and I went in with a bad attitude prepared to hate it. I think I actually liked it more than the kids!! It's really funny, well written for the kids to enjoy but also a lot of adult jokes in there with a great cast. Really recommend.

I was sceptical that a sequel to The LEGO Movie could be pulled off, given that movie's twists and turns in the final act. But Lord & Miller's script pulls it off again. It doesn't have the same surprise, but it retains the heart and love of the product that makes it go beyond a "toy commercial" in to a true heartwarming, entertaining, and most of all, funny movie with a great theme embedded in it. It doesn't quite reach the heights of the predecessor, but it comes so very, very close. It'll be hard not to find something or someone to love in this movie.

Actually the first lego movie and the lego batman movie are quite awesome, with interesting dialogues and original stories. Yet, this lego Movie 2 essentially kills the lego franchise. The screenplay is chaotic. The singing and dancing are merely noisy. The subplots are just irrelevant. The structure is very loose. The plot does not have any sense of credibility. I hoped that it could have become thrilling at some point, but it never did. There is neither anything new nor anything intriguing in the screenplay.

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-)