Everything isn't awesome with Lego Movie 2, but it's still pretty good

Lucy (Elizabeth Banks) and Emmet (Chris Pratt) in Lego Movie 2: The Second Part. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

What is moderately miraculous about the Lego Movie franchise is its ability to find quality despite being a blatant piece of toy marketing. The first movie, the Batman spin-off, and the new one – The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part – are all entertaining and fun, often cleverly written and with at least a modicum of feels to go with it. Lego Movie 2 retains the franchise's commitment to entertain audiences and shift a little merchandise in the process, although its method of entertaining comes at the expense of some of its heart.

Lego Movie 2 picks up right where the original left off, with the introduction of the toddler-based Duplo toys as they invade Bricksburg. Jump ahead five years and Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Lucy (Elizabeth Banks) are surviving in a prototypical Mad-Maxian wasteland, trying to stay out of the sights of the odd alien creatures. That is, until the powerful General Mayhem (Stephanie Beatriz) kidnaps Lucy, Batman (Will Arnett), Unikitty (Alison Brie), MetalBeard (Nick Offerman) and Benny (Charlie Day) and take them to meet Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi (Tiffany Haddish). Fearing for his friends' safety, as well as a prophecy documenting the end of the world, Emmet races off to save them, getting help from the dashing Rex Dangervest (Pratt again) and his crew of raptors along the way.

And, yes, the raptors – who are a comedic highlight – are a direct reference to Pratt's role in the Jurassic World franchise. This is a small taste of Lego Movie 2's general sense of humor, a machine-gun mentality to target as many jokes as possible and see what hits. The example above is one of the stronger references, as the movie never explicitly links Pratt to Jurassic World; the suggested implication is much, much funnier. Most of the references land thanks to the writing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Lord and Miller, who helmed the first movie, take full advantage of Lego's deep reservoir of franchises to toss in jokes subtle and broad. If a Lego version of Sheryl Swoopes exists, give her a line in the movie. If Bruce Willis has a few minutes to spare, let him have a line or two and see what happens. But the real target of Lego Movie 2 is, well, the Lego Movie franchise. The film goes out of its way to mock itself, making fun of everything from character motivations to Everything is Awesome!!! Even the numerous musical numbers exist less to advance the plot and more to outline how an infectious tune is far more notable than a good lyric. The existence of the movie is a joke to Lord and Miller, and they stretch that joke about as far as they can without shattering the film completely.

The ability to consistently tell a good joke is Lego Movie 2's strength... and the source of its weakness. There are so many jokes, so many things to make fun of, the film never develops the strong emotional resonance it seeks. The movie's tone is too silly and self-aware to take any of the action or consequences too seriously. So when the film introduces the real-life consequences to the plastic shenanigans, the emotional punch is weaker than intended. Which is pretty odd considering how well Lord and Miller connect the real-world action to the Lego adventure. It's written so well, almost immaculately structured that the emotional payoff comes very close to working despite the tonal discrepancy. But the feels they go for never quite arrive as they did in the first film, undercut by the plethora of meta jokes. It's really, really difficult to be sarcastic and sincere simultaneously, and LEGO Movie 2 isn't the first film to miss the mark.

This isn't to say Lego Movie 2 doesn't have a heart; rather, there is nary a mean bone in this movie's body. Like Steven Universe, the enemies are less evil than misunderstood, making a peaceful resolution to the film's conflict logical and satisfying. The emphasis on fun ensures the movie is never boring; something is always happening, and it's often joyous and exciting. Given its predecessor and the talent driving its creation, Lego Movie 2 isn't quite as great as it could be, but it is pretty gosh darn awesome for a movie about building blocks.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

 

Rating: PG

Run time: 106 minutes

Genre: Animated

tl;dr

What Worked: Sense of humor, writing.

What Fell Short: It gets a little too meta.

What To Watch As Well: The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie

Pacific Rim sequel falls short on action, monsters

Cailee Spaeny and John Boyega in Pacific Rim: Uprising. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Sequels should very, very, very rarely start off by reusing footage from the original film. It shows the filmmakers have little faith in their audience's ability to keep up with the changes in the sequel while showing a lack of narrative enterprise or ingenuity, lazily rehashing previous efforts. It hurts even more when the previous footage is better than anything the movie has to showcase from its own stock. Which is the case with Pacific Rim: Uprising, a movie that starts off on the wrong foot and is never able, or particularly willing, to steady itself.

What makes the choice strange is how much of the time invested in rehashing old history could be used to improve the sloppy narrative Pacific Rim:Uprising tosses together. At the film's heart is a redemption tale for the very lost Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the son of a legendary Jaeger pilot who died in the first film. That narrative is more than enough to build out a quality movie, providing a pretty solid actor a showcase to build out a character while interspersing some desirable robot versus monster action. But the filmmakers plug in little bits of additional plot lines to muddy the story up. Inserted into the story are a precocious Jaeger cadet Amara (Cailee Spaeny) and her fellow cadets, an ambitious billionaire business owner Shao (Tian Jing), Jake's old friend and current rival Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood), and a few returning players (Rinko Kikuchi, Burn Gorman, and Charlie Day) engaging in some shenanigans. There's also something that resembles a love triangle between Jake, Nate and a woman named Jules (Adria Arjona), but nothing really comes from it. Pacific Rim: Uprising throws together so many plots and subplots nothing is able to stick. Characters aren't given adequate room to grow and evolve the way the filmmakers (four writers, among them director Steven S. DeKnight) expect. Those stories advance in fits and spurts, with little increments that conclude almost immediately without any actual validation. Amara, for example, has a major crisis caused by a bad memory with the villainous Kaiju that causes a legitimate breakdown that is ripe for character development. Instead of showing her growth, the character moves on with minimal effort made to overcome the obstacle. Everyone effectively has their own version of that problem. Character growth isn't earned in this movie, it's told and shown.

It really is hard though to escape the lack of impetus the writing team has put into Pacific Rim: Uprising. The stakes for most of the movie are surprisingly low, especially given the fate of humanity was in danger in the first movie. This movie de-escalates the danger, hiding the threat until the third act, with acts one and two dedicated to establishing the characters poorly while setting up what resembles a political thriller. Without that stake, that hook for the audience to grab onto, Pacific Rim: Uprising is frightfully dull.

In theory, the hook should be the fights between the Jaegers and Kaiju. It's a really, really simple formula to follow, pitting giant fighting robots against monsters rampaging their way through metropolitan areas. This is the kind of idea that appeals to the inner 7 year old because it is fun and awesome. Even a modicum of good spectacle could easily have redeemed Pacific Rim: Uprising, at least enough to overlook the tremendous story and character flaws. And, yet, the movie skimps on the monster action until the very end of the film, providing less than a handful of monsters to fight against the giant robots. The filmmakers effectively had one job to do, but their push to incorporate so many stories in less than two hours prevented them from supplying an adequate amount of monster time.

It's easy to say the film's problems are connected to the absence of Guillermo del Toro from the creative process. And, yeah, Pacific Rim: Uprising would be a much better movie with del Toro helming it, although that can be said about a lot of movies. But this film shouldn't really need his presence to succeed either. What the new filmmakers had was a fun, interesting premise to build at least a good popcorn flick from. They never found a direction, using the original as a crutch and releasing a boring movie. And a boring monster movie is a damn tragedy. 

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 111 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: People who watched the original Pacific Rim and the growing John Boyega fan club.

Take the whole family?: Kids 10 and older should be fine.

Theater or Netflix?: Just stay at home and enjoy it there.

What is up with that love triangle?: This is the plot that bothered me the most about Pacific Rim: Uprising. The filmmakers added an unnecessary love triangle between Jake, Nate and Jules without any justification or true motivation behind it. Even worse, Jules does little else in the move besides serve as an object of mild affection for Jake and Nate. She’s effectively a reason for Jake and Nate to argue, which is an absolute waste of a character.

Watch this instead?: It's cheesy as all heck, but Independence Day is still a pretty fun blockbuster that's worth a trip through memory lane. And you can’t go wrong with the original Godzilla.

Fist Fight never lands a good punch

Ice Cube and Charlie Day in Fist Fight. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

I really don't understand what the filmmakers behind Fist Fight were going for with this movie. I mean, it is supposed to be a comedy and casts ringers like Charlie Day, Tracy Morgan, Jillian Bell and Kumail Nanjiani, along with complementary pieces Dean Norris and Christina Hendricks. But beyond the flailing attempts at comedy, the film lacks a clear message, relatable characters or anything worthy near a logical point. It seems like the movie might have something to say about education, but the folks behind the camera lack the talent and nuance to vocalize it thoroughly.

Fist Fight veers in several directions, bouncing from a story about a stressed out teacher (Charlie Day) trying to escape the titular match/assumed beating from a fellow educator played by Ice Cube to a movie about the sad state of public education to a last day of school flick that comes across as a discount Dazed and Confused knockoff. It tries to be all of these things and, fittingly enough, fails at all of them on some capacity, delivering a movie with a lackadaisical plot with an asinine conclusion. Even its criticisms of the education system are dinged by the savage and cruel actions of the protagonists (Day, Ice Cube and the rest of the staff), heavy hints at sexual abuse toward the students, and the hyper-reality the film lives in. The horrid actions of the students, whose shenanigans cover giving meth to a horse, lassoing teachers to said horse, and masturbating audibly in a public restroom, is either a typical lazy high school film or a parody of lazy high school film. The latter would be a more interesting concept if the film didn't try to ground itself with a story about teachers getting fired wantonly, using the students' outre actions as a sign for theoretically legitimate challenges and issues educators face. In other words, Fist Fight creates an exaggerated reality and uses that exaggerated reality as a root cause for real problems.

Perhaps a narrowly focused narrative – maybe one focused on, say, Day's slow acceptance of his doom at the fists of Ice Cube – would have resulted in better jokes from the writers.The film has many ideas for jokes, like the horse, the onanism and the bizarre behavior from the teachers, along with a hypothesis that swearing is funny in and of itself. Little of it works though because the filmmakers never take the time to develop any of the jokes. They just spit out a line or throw out an image with little context aside from the idea that what they have might be perceived as funny, but without taking the time to find a way to make it funny (let alone inventive or original). It's all wicked lazy and reflective of a general absence of curiosity over the craft they're attempting to master. Comedy is hard, but you have to at least put the effort in to make it work.

That extends to Fist Fight's cast as well, one that on paper is again more than qualified to at least bump this material up to tolerable. Nobody aside from Bell (who offers a peculiarly fascinating performance) appears to care that much about the material or making the junk in front of them work. Day, a person who is often very funny in a supporting role, is miscast as the film's lead, while the idea of Ice Cube being an intimidating on-screen presence went by the wayside after the release of Are We There Yet? That Norris, Nanjiani, Morgan and Hendricks are given so little to do that looking bored on screen is a viable option is a waste of their and the viewers' time.

What makes Fist Fight so frustratingly is it isn't a hopeless film. The pieces exist to build something adequate and at the least entertaining, something of value for people who schlep through a winter's worth of snow for a few laughs and maybe some pointed commentary. Yet the filmmakers seem unsure of how to use what they have to deliver something competent, or at least lack the motivation to do anything with it besides unleash 90 insipid minutes of cinema into the February malaise.

Review: One out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 96 minutes

Genre: Comedy

Ask Away

Target audience: People who like Charlie Day or consider Ice Cube to be an engaging comedic presence.

Take the whole family?: This film traffics in curses and obscene imagery, so perhaps keeping kids at home is for the best.

Theater or Netflix?: Neither is a good option.

What else is wrong about this film?: One of the main plot points is the school districts waiting for the end of the last day of school to inform the teachers if they'll be retained or not. Most states, including the one the film is set in, require districts to extend contracts for renewal well before the end of the school year (due in part to the need to get the budget prepared by the end of the fiscal year in June). In other words, even the process the film uses to fire teachers is malarkey.

Watch this instead?: There are many, many better comedies to watch than this, but I'm going to go outside the box a bit and recommend 24 Hours to Live from Hey Arnold! This episode also has a character waiting for a fist fight from a stronger opponent, albeit with a more interesting plot and a nifty resolution to the issue.