When “The LEGO Movie,” made its way to theaters in early
2014, there wasn’t much reason to expect it to be more than a simple cash grab;
a feature-length commercial for the long-beloved building block toys. Instead,
directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller invested their film with more wit and
imagination than they needed to, making a sweet-natured ode to childhood
creativity that ended up being one of the best family films in recent memory.
So of course any sequel has a lot to live up to. Working with
director Mike Mitchell, Lord and Miller (returning as writers and producers
this time around) succeed in making “The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part” just as
clever, inventive, and funny as the first, even if a bit of the novelty has
worn off.
The plot picks up five years after the original film, and
everything’s no longer awesome in Bricksburg. A war
with a race of baby-voiced alien invaders made from Duplo blocks has left the
city a dystopian wasteland straight out of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and the citizens
have all adapted to this new, hardened way of life. All, that is, except for
Emmet (Chris Pratt), who’s somehow maintained his sunny, cheerfully naive
outlook despite the devastation that surrounds him. This frustrates Wyldstyle, aka Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), who wants him to
grow up and be as serious as everyone else.
But when his friends are taken hostage by General Mayhem
(Stephanie Beatriz), and taken back to the planet ruled by shape-shifting alien
Queen WatevraWa’Nabi
(Tiffany Haddish, making a seemingly effortless
transition into voice acting) Emmet musters up the courage to go after them.
Along the way, he gets some help from Rex Dangervest
(also voiced by Pratt), a more traditionally aggressive tough guy hero who
offers to help mold Emmet into the manly hero he says Emmet’s friends need him
to be.
As in the first film, “The LEGO Movie 2” has plenty of humor
poking fun at the tropes of “chosen one” hero’s journey narratives. And while
the first film had a late-in-the-game meta reveal in
which we learned that a live action, real-world universe was shaping and
influencing the film’s story, the new film makes greater use of that element.
When the people of Bricksburg quarrel with an alien
race, we see that it’s really a now teenaged Finn (Jadon Sand) fighting with
his younger sister Bianca (Brooklynn Prince). Their central conflict comes from
his surly, adolescent male imagination clashing with the exuberance of the
young girl’s.
“The LEGO Movie 2” maintains the first’s central core of
sweetness, and though it doesn’t feel as effortless this time around, the film
manages to juggle a number of potent ideas beneath its bright and candy-colored
exterior. It continues the first film’s celebration of creativity and childlike
joy, expanding to incorporate the notion of growing up and the way we’re
encouraged to develop a hardened shell of seriousness as we get older.
Mitchell, Lord, and Miller even manage to weave in some
pointed messages about the dangers of xenophobia through the film’s characters’
encounters with alien Duplos. When the film says that
those who are different should be greeted with nothing but love and compassion,
it’s a sweet and resonant message, showing that there’s no limit to the ideas
that can be built from a simple movie about toy bricks.
This article appears in Feb 13-19, 2019.
