"Emmet, You've Gotta Stop Pretending Everything Is Awesome. It Isn't..."
When it comes to 2014's The Lego Movie, it is fair to say in retrospect that everything and everyone involved with such a movie was indeed particularly awesome, with my own personal view at the time of its' initial release verging more on the side of caution when contemplating a feature length movie based upon those tiny multi coloured blocks that really hurt your feet when accidentally stepped upon. With the movie blossoming from the much welcome mix of critical and financial success therefore, including the added impotence of journeys into the realm of equally successful spin-offs, including the ridiculously entertaining, The Lego Batman Movie, which remains my personal of the series so far, here we are again with The Lego Movie 2, the inevitable animated sequel which sees Phil Lord and Christopher Miller drop from directorial duties as they boast both a production role and a screenplay for Trolls and Shrek Forever After director, Mike Mitchell, to work around. With the first film famously featuring a central twist in which we see that the lives of our yellow faced friends are actually being controlled by the hands of Will Ferrell and his playful son, The Lego Movie 2 takes matters a step forward as we see the young sister of the family now being allowed to play with the seemingly endless pool of Lego, resulting in Chris Pratt's (Avengers: Infinity War) Emmett being heart and centre of a series of utmost destruction which turns his world into a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max inspired war zone.
With Emmett attempting to remain as the same old, happy-go-lucky everyman amidst a wasteland of negativity, he is soon called into action after Elizabeth Banks' (Power Rangers) Lucy is kidnapped alongside a group of fellow heroes in order to satisfy the ambiguous wishes of Tiffany Haddish's (Night School) Queen Watevra Wa-Nabi, the shape-shifting ruler of the wonderfully named, Systar System. Sounds bonkers right? And The Lego Movie 2 is just that, a bizarre but highly comical animated adventure which successfully manages to balance the right amount of cinematic appeal to both older and younger audiences, with the colourful, playfulness of the visuals and the smirk-inducing slapstick guaranteed to keep the children in the audience entertained, whilst the array of constantly smart and well-timed comedic gags and slight, off-hand knowing film geek references, including digs at particular film franchises and comic book heroes, are worked effectively into the narrative in order to make the more mature audience member giggle with glee. Whilst the film does struggle to contain the steady hit-rate of comedy throughout its' slightly misjudged one hundred minute runtime, a weakness which also affects the pacing of the piece, particularly around the halfway mark, The Lego Movie 2 is a worthy successor to a movie which I can admit to being wrong about first time around, albeit one which fails to land the same kind of punches The Lego Batman Movie managed to do. Maybe more Batman next time. You can never have too much Batman.
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