MOVIE REVIEW – The first Lego Movie was a favourite of mine back in 2014, and Warner Bros Animation got their selves a smash hit. A budget of 60-70 million making an astonishing 450 million. Ever since 2014, they have been trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle moment. This actually worked in 2017 with The Lego Batman movie, their second movie in the Lego theatrical movies, and it was also a very good DC movie. Then there was the Ninja Go movie, a full movie for one of the longest-running Cartoon Network series, which was just okay, but nothing spectacular.

 

Now in 2019 a sequel for the original movie that started the craze is back, and this time we venture away to far away worlds, and Emmet finally needs to grow?

Everything Is Not Awesome

The second movie starts where the first one left off. Duplos from the sky invade the lego world, but not before Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt) tries to make peace. Sadly this backfires massively, and the movie cuts to five years in the future where Bricksburg has become an Apocalypseburg due to the Duplo invasion, a wasteland ruled by tough and more mature Legos. Except for Emmet who after five years is still an optimistic little brick.

This all changes, when a mysterious entity comes from the faraway space system, called the Systar System and abduct five of Emmet’s friend including Lucy (voiced by Elizabeth Banks). It is up to Emmet to finally become a gritty space warrior and go and save everyone on his own, even if nobody believes in him. At least that’s what he will try to do during the movie, to try and be more mature.

That is the central theme of the movie, trying to be mature, and also generally just making fun of the fact that how a lot of things are viewed as gritty and dark. It works well and especially in the first half of the movie, where Emmet is „learning” to be someone who he is not. On the other hand, the movie is building up to this epic event called „OUR-MAMA-GEDDON”, where every lego piece disappears from the world.

Another Brick In The Wall

Throughout the movie, the jokes seem a bit less punchy for some odd reason, and the movie seems to be throwing red herrings, and M.Night Shyamalan tier twists all over the place. The jokes are not bad, by any stretch of the imagination, its just that compared to the first movie, and even Lego Batman Movie had more jokes. In fact, at times I felt this was a musical since there are at least four or five scenes with full musical sequences. The songs are still great, but in this case, it felt like filler to pass the time.

The side characters also barely do anything in the movie, and they are sort of just there in the background. Most of the cast also seems downgraded. Liam Neeson is not back as Good Cop / Bad Cop, and Will Ferrel is back as Lord Business for two scenes and did not even bother to show up for the live action scenes. Speaking of live-action scenes, the actors playing the kids and the Mom were horrible, and the scenes shot felt like out of a low-budget movie. All the while everything in the Lego World feels epic and grandiose, with interesting builds created by the block builders. Yet the movie just feels flat in a lot of points, and it could have had a better script, that was a tiny bit more focused.

It is a comedy movie that has a lot of great ideas in it, and some of them are executed well enough, but some ideas are just there for filler (like some of the songs). Even though some songs are filler they are great, really catch, and the voice works are perfect. While Lego Movie 2 had a bigger budget to it then the first one, the final product is a bit weaker than the last two movies

A fun movie for everyone, but at the same time feels like a bit of a downgrade compared to the old movies.

-Dante-