The Lego Movie was a very pleasant and unique miracle for everybody. For many years, there’s been countless soulless cash-grabs of merchandising properties, so when a movie based around Legos was announced in 2011, it sounded like it would be one of the worst of the bunch. Against all odds, The Lego Movie was instead a very charming, funny, likeable, and clever film that took all the wonderful qualities that came with the brand, used its premise and even marketability to its advantage, and provided a movie that adheres to both kids and adults, to the point where people were actually annoyed it didn’t get nominated for an Oscar. With this in mind, it makes sense that they’d want to make a sequel as they would eventually do in 2019, but did it really need one? After failing to prevent the invasion of the Duplo aliens five years prior, the Lego universe has become an apocalyptic wasteland where everything is not awesome anymore. Despite most of the characters, including Lucy/Wyldstyle (voiced again by Elizabeth Banks) adapting to this new world by obtaining a brooding personality, the ever-optimistic Emmet (voiced again by Chris Pratt) hasn’t, which causes many around him to view him as not ‘’grown-up’’ enough. Situations worsen when a masked doll named General Sweet Mayhem (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz) kidnaps all of Emmet’s friends and takes them to the glisty, party-heavy planet of Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi (voiced by Tiffany Haddish) who appears to have brought them here as an invitation to her wedding, in which she plans to marry Batman (voiced again by Will Arnett) and join their worlds together in harmony, with no evil schemes happening in the background at all. While Emmet tries and fails to find his friends in the ‘’Stairgate”, he teams up with rugged adventurer, Rex Dangervest (also voiced by Chris Pratt) who appears to be everything Emmet wishes to be like. With the two working together and concocting a plan to save his friends and destroy the wedding, Emmet makes his way to Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi’s planet in order to stop the impending “armamageddon” from coming to pass, even though things might not be as he expects them to be. Although being generally well received by critics and audiences, The Lego Movie 2 didn’t make the same splash as its predecessor, and while it still contains a few shining blocks of praise, the overall display isn’t up to scratch and doesn’t do a lot to prove it needed to be created.

The idea for a sequel was created pretty early on as it was announced four days before the release of the first film, showing they wanted to continue this IP even before they were aware of the success that would come from it. This sequel required a lot of tampering and script changes throughout its production history, as well as a change in director, until it was eventually completed and released. At a first glance, you can feel a similar energy, pacing and even style of humor from the movie, and it does keep within continuity from the last film’s humorous cliff-hanger, which results in a narrative direction and tone completely unlike the first film, so there isn’t a fault of lazy repeating and story retreding which is nice. However, the film’s issues don’t feel like large-scale problems, but rather little flaws that boil up to eventually result in a spoiled final result. The change in director feels like an element that makes this film just feel too dissimilar to the first, with previous directing/writing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, now only acting as the screenwriters for the film, while Mike Mitchell took the directing helm. His past work involved projects like Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Sky High, Shrek Forever After, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked and Trolls, so it’s safe to say his track record is mixed at best and flawed at worst, and what he brought to this film, while not awful, definitely isn’t on the same vein as its previous. There’s a lack of that unique fun spark that the first film inhabited and crucially, the movie doesn’t operate well within this sour atmosphere. While it does balance out better as it continues, the film’s opening with this super aggressive and childishly angsty tone just doesn’t hit as effectively as the first film’s jovial, positive, and comforting atmosphere, and removing that element just doesn’t feel like a smart decision. With that said, the movie does attempt to use that very idea to its advantage and constructs the narrative written by Lord, Miller and Matthew Fogel in a way that does technically make sense and connects with the theme of childhood play and the effect that growing up has on that level of play (which was what the first film was essentially about), but it’s also matched with some odd plot decisions that make zero sense once they start to explain them. The script for this isn’t terrible, but definitely isn’t tight enough to ignore these plot holes, make every joke work, make all the characters feel well-utilized or create a sequel that feels necessary. It features similar ideas and a delivery of said idea to the last film, it just doesn’t work as well and feels more like a necessity to the brand rather than because it matches the story. The film does come to a relatively satisfying conclusion, but it’s not one that feels like it needed that journey in order to reach it.

Most of the characters acted as a nice balance between recognizable faces from other franchises (Lego Batman became pretty popular due to these movies) and new faces that didn’t feel overshadowed by the franchise names and molded their own identity very effectively. They were a very likeable group that had this child-like mentality (which makes a lot of sense upon the first film’s twist) but also this nice adult sense of awareness that gave them punch and wit without losing that innocent edge to them. With that in mind, you can feel that they aren’t characters that could evolve past one movie because most of them don’t feel like they do anything that overwhelming new or different in this one. Most of the side characters that felt pretty meaningful in the first film now just kind of exist in the background of several scenes so they can say a few lines but nothing much else, it just feels like the group effort of the last film has been reduced to mainly just the leads, which wouldn’t be an issue if they were handled better. Emmet’s positive attitude against this apocalyptic setting is cute for a bit, but much like a good chunk of the movie, that element quickly wears off as the film continues and his role is meshed together with this twist involving the character of Rex which is so ridiculous and makes no sense given the context of the world they’ve created  (it’s a pretty obvious twist for adults from the get-go, even if kids might not be able to figure it out). The villain has a fun design, some of the interaction she has with the rest of the cast are enjoyable (her and Batman actually falling in love is a little cute) and there’s even a nice bait-and-switch involving their true motives near the end of the film, but she isn’t strong enough to save some of the film’s issues. There is a decent message in this film about the idea of playful kindness and excitable joy being important and necessary for maturing, even if several things tell you it requires someone to be closed-off, action-heavy and even brooding in nature, but it feels like it gets so caught up in the delivery of that message that it fails to portray the story in a coherent way, and the characters just start to feel like placeholders for this message rather than active participants in their own narrative (again, a little ironic given the twist of the first film).

The technology used in the first film to make a stop-motion like movie with Lego parts resulted in a wonderful looking movie that used very smart techniques to make these inanimate objects look and feel alive within these very vibrant and creative worlds. This film still contains some very solid tricks, and you can feel them trying to one-up themselves on several occasions through some of the more intricate sequences (there are a few songs numbers in this movie where the camera work and even choreography are getting pretty into it). It doesn’t feel like a massive improvement from the previous (at least to the point of a recognizable difference), but it is still a very nice-looking film that has a lot of colorful expressive characters and environments, almost to a fault. The color palette is much more centred on colors like blue, pink, and a lot of purple, which can be a little jarring to see constantly in your face at all times. It isn’t too heavy of a problem, but it makes sense that this director also made Trolls, because that film also suffers a similar problem of featuring too much of a cotton-candy fluff environment that could be a little retina-burning. The music in this film hits the necessary beats that are required for this kind of story and genre, and the songs included feel like they are either too self-aware of what kind of role they play in the movie or just don’t have enough going for them to really stand out, even if none of them are awful. It’s a movie that doesn’t require music numbers and even the people in charge of the film inserted them in later down the line just to compete with the success of other animated musicals, so you can feel that they just sort of state the obvious, serve a very singular purpose, and even if they sound nice, could’ve been cut out without much issue.

The Lego Movie was like striking gold in a coal mine, and it was a brilliant roll-of-the-dice that it turned out to be as successful and popular as it was. The Lego Movie 2 is like finding Fools Gold; it looks the part and would be able to fool people on the first glance that its the same kind of gem, but is only the same from a surface level, doesn’t feel like the part and isn’t nearly as valuable (or financially profitable). The movie in many ways isn’t bad; it provides a perfectly decent story with likeable characters, some of the jokes work, some of the visuals are nice, and while adults probably won’t connect with this one to the same extent as the first,  it feels like kids will like it fine. But for a movie that exceeded so many expectations, this as a follow up does feel like a massive step down and really highlights how it didn’t even need a sequel in the first place. It had success with the spin-off that came from The Lego Batman Movie, so that direction was going fine, but now with Warner Brothers selling the movie rights to Universal, the future is up in the air for this franchise. Since many others tried to replicate its style of visuals, comedy and mix of heart and nostalgia, it ironically didn’t feel as fresh anymore once the original creators came back for seconds and its tragic to see that it wasn’t able to capture the same kind of magic as before, but much like what the movie states, it may not be awesome, but it’s not bad either and that middle ground will satisfy enough.

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