MOVIE REVIEW: FTN reviews The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (U)
Directed by: Mike Mitchell
Starring: Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks & Will Arnett
Running time: 1hr 46mins

It’s been five years since everything was awesome and the citizens are facing a huge new threat: LEGO DUPLO® invaders from outer space, wrecking everything faster than they can rebuild.

So, there’s no question this was a potential disaster – The LEGO Movie was a lot of fun and certainly gave the world something they never expected but with the million LEGO Shorts on TV not to mention the solid-but-too-long LEGO Batman Movie and the better-than-expected Ninjago LEGO Movie, you could have been forgiven for expecting a movie that would simply rethread the same ground as the first movie.

And it does… to a point.

But thankfully it also injects enough new ideas – acceptance, growing older, staying true to who you are and consequences – to allow the familiar to be forgiven as the new, thankfully, really outweighs it.

Gone is the over-reliance of ‘oh look, there’s Simpsons LEGO! Look, there’s Gandalf! Look, there’s the agents out of The Matrix (who never arrived in brick form!)’ and this time the story focuses on Emmett, Lucy (formerly Wyldstyle) and newcomer Rex (also played by Chris Pratt and definitely doing a homage to Kurt Russell in, well, anything) and it travels down the Toy Story route of what happens when toys outgrow their owners… or vice versa.

But it handles it well, and despite being little bricks of plastic these characters have plenty of, em, character and we do feel for them as they go through the trials and tribulations of this outer-space adventure.

And the great thing is that the movie has a great message as its heart – acceptance, understanding, embracing the people you love for who they are and not what you want them to be… and more that anything it quite simply tells us that no matter what the issues – and this is an important message in this world of ours gone topsy-turvey – sit and talk it out because, when it all boils down to it, we have more in common than we do in differences.

And the great thing is that we – especially us Nerdy types – have many things we love trying to tell us that in a heavy-handed way that can feel agenda-driven and in your face, but here the script by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller takes it in its stride and, like the other outstanding animated movie of the last few months, Spider-man: Into The Spider-verse, it gives us a great message by simply…. telling a good story.

But never fear, I make it sound like a moral, serious adventure and it’s not. Simply sit back, relax and enjoy the ride and at the end you may just feel a bit more enlightened about the world around you.

Building (ahem) on the world of the first movie and subsequent spin-offs, The LEGO Movie 2 goes down the Toy Story road and it’s better for it. Of course there’s a lot of similar and familiar laughs, but the rules were established five years ago and this time out the studio managed to shake it up just enough to create a fun sequel that will keep the fans more than happy.

Everything is awesome, still.

Well played LEGO.

4 out of 5 Nerds