Secret Life of Pets 2 short on inspiration

Max (Patton Oswalt) in The Secret Life of Pets 2. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The Secret Life of Pets 2 is an average entry in Illumination's animation stable. It's colorful and cheery, containing a skosh of inventiveness and a hint of weirdness or inspiration, just enough to maybe think the movie will actually be sort of interesting. Illumination movies never come close to fulfilling those flashes of interesting because of uninspired animation and static writing. Because mediocrity is easy, and it's far more profitable to be inoffensive than experimental.

Picking up some time following the events of the first film, Secret Life of Pets 2 is divided into three plots. Plot A has Max (now voiced by Patton Oswalt) and Duke (Eric Stonestreet) dedicating themselves to their owner's (Ellie Kemper) son Liam. They spend much of the film at a farm, with Max learning lessons about courage from the bold Rooster (Harrison Ford, clearly not caring). Plot B has Snowball (Kevin Hart) joining new dog Daisy (Tiffany Haddish) in an adventure to save a white tiger from the evil Sergei (Nick Kroll) and his wolves. They also run into the crotchety Pops (Dana Carvey) along the way. Plot C has Gidget (Jenny Slate) taking cat lessons from Chloe (Lake Bell) to get a toy back from some vicious kitties. The three plots eventually intersect in the third act, with the pets joining forces before getting rewarded for being very good dogs, cats, bunnies, and tigers.

Good lord is Secret Life of Pets 2 boring. Even with three plots, there isn't a lot actually happening on screen because the narratives are unambitious. The jokes rarely land, sort of stuck in this weird liminal state between catering to children and serving adults. Despite having quality comedic talent (Oswalt, Slate, Bell, Haddish, and even Hart), it's impressive how few jokes land. There are a few interesting ideas – a nice animation sequence with Snowball, the conclusion to Gidget's story – but not enough to ever be memorable. Things happen in Secret Life of Pets 2, but they're more incidentally quotidian than engaging.

The mistake of splitting Secret Life of Pets 2 into thirds is a lack of time for story development. Max and Duke at the farm with Rooster could be interesting, if the film allotted more time to add depth to the adventures and provide a concrete lesson that doesn't feel rushed. Snowball and Daisy saving the tiger is a fun idea, but it needs more time to build tension and establish the wolves as a full threat and give the tigers something more to do than hide. Gidget and Chloe is about as complete a story as this film has, but it could still use more time to explore the divine weirdness of its premise. This is pretty par for the course for Illumination, which toys with cool ideas but strays away to provide a mundane viewing experience.

 

If there's one thing Secret Life of Pets 2 has in its favor, its the relationship between Max and Liam. There's an inherent sweetness to watching a dog and his boy bond, with Max evolving into a guardian for his adoptive child. Even if this plot, like much of the rest of the film, is underdeveloped, the moment at the end where Liam hugs his dogs still hits the heart strings effectively. The brilliance is in its simplicity; the scene succeeds because it connects to a lot of childhood memories. If the movie knows one thing, it's that dogs are more often than not the best. (All scientific evidence shows my golden retrievers, Currie and Haley, were the best.)

That's one of the reasons I liked this movie more than the original. Haddish is a nice addition to the franchise, and adding her cuts down on Duke. Secret Life of Pets 2 cuts back heavily on the time padding and replaces it with actual plot, and an incomplete plot is far better than no plot at all. Adding Liam and avoiding a repeat of the jealousy plot of the original makes for a more touching film, albeit one that still feels incomplete. Secret Life of Pets 2 isn't particularly interesting, but it's inoffensive enough to keep kids occupied until the next Toy Story movie comes out. It's also really difficult to make an unappealing film about dogs.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 86 minutes

Genre: Animated

tl;dr

What Worked: Voice Talent, the Max-Liam Relationship

What Fell Short: Lack of enthusiasm, Underdeveloped Plots

What To Watch Instead: Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted

Sing consistently off-key

Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) in Sing. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Sing opens on a particularly illogical and nonsensical note and never rights its course, opting to run through more 108 minutes of crass jokes, flatulence jokes and an overabundance of Seth MacFarlane to end with something miles away from heartfelt. Sing isn't much of a film, yet it somehow doesn't cross into abhorrent or awful either; it's just annoyingly bad, too lazy and uninspired to do much more than exist and crank out pop music covered by famous actors and aspiring singers.

None of this is really all that surprising. The studio responsible for this, Illumination, is known for producing this type of fair. It has one solid film in Despicable Me and a whole mess of whatevers, including this summer's mediocre Secret Life of Pets. It's an uninteresting studio designed to make lower-budget animated films like Sing and earn a hefty profit in the process, rarely caring for artistic merit, good storytelling or sophisticated jokes. The studio never aspires to be Pixar, Disney, Studio Ghibli or even DreamWorks, although its films cost the same amount at the cinema as the films by the other four. Not every film is going to be Toy Story 3, Moana, My Neighbor Totoro, or Chicken Run, but you'd hope a studio would chuck in a modicum of effort into producing films. Illumination, however, doesn't seem too interested in actually doing something with its animation quality, plot or characters, hitting the proverbial notes as needed to create an overstuffed pile of meh. In a year with a pair of legitimately great animated films and a few OK ones, Sing is just there, waiting for the money to roll in from viewers with little else to do on a December afternoon.  

Usually a film like Sing has a clever idea or some promise that isn't fulfilled, a redeeming quality just under the surface to be positive about. That is very much not the case. The premise, about a collection of anthropomorphic regular folks (voiced by Scarlett Johansson as a porcupine, Reese Witherspoon as a pig, Tori Kelly as an elephant, Taron Egerton as a gorilla, Nick Kroll as another pig and the aforementioned MacFarlene as a mouse) competing in a talent competition run by Matthew McConaughey as a koala with bad business sense, isn't innovative or interesting on its own. Not a fatal flaw if the writers find something interesting to say about it, which they do not. Excluding a bizarre subplot involving MacFarlane's awful mouse wannabe lounge singer, the film never veers off the boring characters take their chance at stardom, doubt themselves, then rise up again to put on a whopper of a performance because that would require some thought and nuance, concepts this film prefers to avoid.

Well, technically the film does make a viewer think about the inane insanity of the film universe. Much of the soundtrack consists of covers of songs like Shake It Off, Call Me Maybe, My Way, Hallelujah, and Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing. An underlying issue though is how these animals are singing these songs; the original artists are never mentioned in animal form, yet they are part of the fabric of the film universe. Is this some sort of universe in which animals have copies of popular music produced by humans? Were the humans conquered recently a la Planet of the Apes, their music, clothes and cars the only remnants of the pre-animal conquered world? Are there animal versions of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Stevie Wonder and Leonard Cohen (RIP) floating around this animal universe? Really, is there a reason to have animal characters instead of humans? The answer to the last point is a resounding no, besides maybe a cuteness factor that is unrelated to the plot, script or good storytelling techniques.

The closest Sing gets to finding some emotional resonance is at the end, amid the grand performance the animals had worked so hard to perfect despite all the bland and easily avoidable obstacles in their way. After Kelly's elephant rocks out to an uninspired cover of a great Stevie Wonder song, a slight chill ran through my body and I thought maybe this film has found a place in my heart. Then I remembered I had walked through a heavy rain in November to get to this screening and my clothes were still soaked. I continued to shiver, my only comfort being that I won't have to watch Sing again any time soon.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 108 minutes

Genre: Animated
 

Ask Away

Target audience: Families who can't get tickets to Rogue One.

Take the whole family?: The film gets lazy with a couple of fart jokes, but on the whole there isn't anything objectionable about the content besides the quality.

Theater or Netflix?: Wait for home if you must watch it.

What's the deal with Seth MacFarlene?: He is the one character who bugs me more than anything else in this film. While the other characters are at least trying to do something with their lives, MacFarlene's mouse is awful, never really interested in redeeming himself. That his crappy character also offers MacFarlene to indulge in his fantasies of being Sinatra (when he's at best a C- Bublé)  is all the more frustrating.

Watch this instead?: There's still an animated musical in theaters that is leagues better than this thing. It’s called Moana.

The Secret Life of Pets is surprisingly mundane

Gidget, voiced by Jenny Slate, is pictured in a scene from The Secret Life of Pets. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The Secret Life of Pets marks the sixth film animation studio Illumination has spawned and it follows in the footstep of at least four of those (excluding the miserable Hop.) Like its predecessors, The Secret Life of Pets is a serviceable enough film with a few flashing moments of intrigue overwhelmed by mediocrity and profit hawking. It's the kind of film that references the studio's most popular franchise, Despicable Me, twice in less than an hour and a half. That followed a short film preceding the feature itself starring the company's breakout characters, the Minions.

Illumination knows exactly where it's bread is buttered and how to appeal to a wide consumer base. Making a movie with any true artistic statement, however, seems to be a little outside of its wheelhouse.

There's nothing overly wrong with The Secret Life of Pets. It's a cute enough idea with a few moments that capture the premise's adorableness aptly – most notably an end sequence set to Bill Withers' wonderful Lovely Day – and nice voice work from Jenny Slate, Lake Bell, Dana Carvey and a few glorious seconds of a menacing Al Brooks. Some of the jokes land well enough, most notably when the writers get a little macabre with their humor. It's a well designed film, in as much as the design is to appease kids without actually challenging them in any meaningful way.

Disney, Pixar and even (sometimes) DreamWorks have offered fair directed at children that has more depth, nuance and aesthetic pleasures than anything Illumination has cobbled together. And despite the animated format and the main appeal to a youth audience, viewers can and should expect better than the less than stellar tricks the film uses to tell its story. The Secret Life of Pets takes the proverbial easy way out from the very first frame that shows exterior photos of famous New York City landmarks set to Taylor Swift's Welcome to New York. A vehicular chase scene involving Brooklyn is scored to the Beastie Boys' No Sleep Till Brooklyn, whilst a fantasy sequence about friendship is coupled with Queen's You're My Best Friend. It's as if the multitude of filmmakers – the movie has two directors and three writers credited – are afraid of relying on audience a modicum of audience intuition.

Illumination is a fearful studio, happy to offend in trivial, kid friendly ways (this film has a fair amount of jokes about pooping and peeing) but not in a fashion that is daring or risky. The studio, and The Secret Life of Pets by default, is uninterested in being interesting, using the most generic building material possible to construct a nondescript house in the middle of suburbia. Nothing is memorable about this film except how unmemorable it is, a beige stain on a grey carpet.

The metaphor serves as a description of the film’s overall messiness. The Secret Life of Pets covers at least three subplots: one an Odd Couple lite story between main dog Max (Louis C.K.) and new arrival Duke (Eric Stonestreet); one a rescue mission led by Slate's love-struck Gidget; and one a revenge tale centered on an annoying rabbit voiced by Kevin Hart) in less than 90 minutes. Attempting to cover so much in such little time grants little to no proper development of any of those three plots. The writers even shoehorned a pair of fantasy sequences in to fill time in a movie where a lack of time is a major flaw.

Then there's the animation that, like Minions, The Lorax, and Hop before it, is never bad like Norm of the North, but is perpetually uninspired. That's vital for an animated film to create a world for the audience to get lost in, or at least replace the reality it eschews. Films like Zootopia and even the otherwise disappointing Finding Dory excel at fleshing out their fictional universes; The Secret Life of Pets has bothersome character designs and humans who always appear dopey in some capacity.

The Secret Life of Pets is a success because it isn't built for excellence. The film will sell toys and apparel, promote impending Illumination products (like more Despicable Me films) and keep kids relatively quiet for a spell in the summer. Pet owners will be somewhat charmed by the premise and the snuggle sequence at the end, although adults will more than likely leave a little unimpressed with the totality of the experience. That still counts as a success for Illumination; after all, it's nearly impossible to fail when the standards are this low.

Review: Two and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 90 minutes

Genre: Animated 
 

Ask Away

Target audience: Families too bored to do anything else this summer.

Take the whole family?: A fair amount of scatological humor might make this a bit inappropriate for some families, but the overall tone is light enough to avoid being too problematic.

Theater or Netflix?: Take the kids to the matinee if you need to get them outside the house this summer.

How is the Minion short?: Pretty uninspiring. The short, Mower Minions, has a gaggle of the little yellow things attempt to do lawn work for money. It's pretty much the same general shenanigans the Babel Fish infected walking Twinkies have engaged in/earned the studio much profit from in the last couple of years. Like the film preceding it, it's not bad, but it isn't particularly clever either.

Watch this instead?: The other movie to come out this year featuring anthropomorphic creatures, Zootopia, is leagues better than this. You could also search around for the old clam shell covered VHS version of 101 Dalmatians and put that back in the VCR.