The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
Year: 2019
Rating: PG
Length: 107 minutes / 1.78 hours
Back in 2014, children at heart everywhere were able to experience the world’s most successful building toy brand on the big screen via The LEGO Movie. With a catchy, Oscar-winning song, this Matrix-like movie was fun and self-aware. Fast forward five years, and the sequel, The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part (2019) released with hardly the amount of fanfare and advertising that accompanied the original. I think this may have been in part due to how the formula the first movie used to great success has been done to death now. With spinoffs like The LEGO Batman Movie (2017) and The LEGO Ninjago Movie(2017) saturating the market, it’s hard to capture the magic of the original.
The real problem with The Second Part comes via the twist at the end of the first movie. Now that we know these toys merely exist in the imagination of a young boy, it’s hard to put that reveal back into the bag and continue watching without your mind being regularly reminded of this fact. Added to this is the somewhat convoluted plot that doesn’t do much more than preach an after-school message about sharing. Sure, it tries to gloss over its weak points by adding plenty of new songs (none of which are particularly memorable). However, all it did was remind me how the first movie was so much better.
Growing up with the classic LEGO sets, I did have to adjust to the realization that the “girl” LEGOs were recent additions and not knockoff brand pieces. Now, don’t get me wrong here; there were still some funny moments. Even if the majority of these moments were self-aware and aimed at the adults in the audience, they still made me laugh. I also really liked the end credits sequence, which looked quite sharp. In the end, though, I was ultimately disappointed that this sequel couldn’t live up to its predecessor’s success.
A so-so sequel partially ruined by the ending of the first movie, I give The LEGO Movie 2 3.0 stars out of 5.
