It’s become a cliché to say
that Phil Lord and Chris Miller are one of the best teams working in Hollywood,
but sometimes something becomes cliché because they’re true. It’s especially impressive
since they’ve carved a very unique niche for themselves: taking properties that
would otherwise just be glorified commercials, and making them work by embracing
their inherently commercial nature and turning them into something completely transcendent.
It’ evident in everything they’ve touched from 21 Jump Street to Spider-Man:
Into the Spider-Verse, but the greatest example of this ability is The Lego Movie. Lego is not only one of
the biggest toy brands on the planet, but also one of the few properties that
feels like it would be impossible to make into a movie, due it not having a set
cast of characters and built on the attitude of letting kids use their imagination
to build whatever they want. But Lord and Miller used this blank slate
aesthetic to their advantage by creating a self-referencing satire of the hero’s
journey story structure and hinging the conflict on the different philosophies
of Lego building (following the instructions vs. building what you want). This
time around they’re only onboard as screenwriters, and while that understanding
of how this kind of thing works is present, the direction doesn’t show the same
amount of confidence.
Our story picks up five years
after and deals with the aftermath of the cliffhanger of the first Lego Movie. After the city of
Brickopolis is decimated by invaders from the planet Duplo, its citizens have
become battle hardened. All except for Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt), who
remains irrepressibly positive, even when everyone around him has toughened up,
and even when Lucy/Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) insists that he needs to grow up
and be more serious. A second wave of invaders arrive and kidnaps Lucy along
with their friends Batman (Will Arnett), Uikitty (Alison Brie), Metalbeard the
Pirate (Nick Offerman) and Benny the Spaceman (Charlie Day), so Emmet sets a
course for the Sistar System to save his friends from the clutches of the
shapeshifting Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi (Tiffany Haddish) with the help of the
roguish space cowboy archaeologist Rex Dangervest (also Chris Pratt).
If that sounds like the
scattershot plot of a kid playing with his toys, it’s because that’s exactly
what’s going on. Anyone who found themselves exhausted by the madcap,
gags-a-poppin’, anything goes approach to storytelling of the first one won’t
find much relief, since the second go is more or less the same. Just to
refresh, the big twist of the first Lego Movie was that it was all in the
imagination of a little boy playing with his dad’s Lego set, who built a
meticulously detailed cityscape. While that was a big gotcha that completely
upends your understanding of what was going on, the sequel rolls with that from
the get-go. The dynamic between reality and fantasy are also more apparent and
easier to spot. It takes the final ten seconds of the first, which was
initially treated as a jokey To Be Continued ending, and not only stretched it
further, but used it as a catalyst to expand on its own themes, including the
ethos of its insanely catchy theme song, “Everything is Awesome”,
up to and including a reworking of the song that explores the flipside of that
whole philosophy. Oh, did I mention that this was a musical?
Where the first was all about pure
creativity vs. structure and following the rules and knowing what to apply to
which situation, the second part is all about what it means to be grown up,
particularly skewering the notion that growing up means abandoning childish
things and taking everything seriously all the time, going so far to eschew
things like compassion and cooperation. It’s basically the same lesson Batman
had to learn in The
Lego Batman Movie, except that lesson is filtered through the lens of gender.
A lot of people assumed based on this
line from the trailer and the candy color scheme of the antagonist’s lair that
this was going to be a screed against the gender assignment of toys, but it twists
those expectations even further. Rex Dangervest, meanwhile, is a hybrid of all
of Chris Pratt’s post-Parks and
Recreation action roles who teaches Emmet, a master builder, how to be a
master breaker. It doesn’t take much to see where the story’s going or spot the
parallels between the play world and the real world, but it works with the
other big selling point of Lego: that despite having marketed playsets targeted
at one demographic or the other, it’s by a very nature a collage where those
barriers mean nothing.
Bottom line, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part is a delightfully sweet piece of pop optimism that's a bit slipshod and scatterbrained at first, but once you figure out where it's going, it's easier to get on board with. While isn’t
nearly as deep of a meta-narrative rabbit hole as the first part, it still
serves as a silly slice of joy that encourages cooperation and embracing
the unfamiliar. It shows us that growing up doesn’t have to include discarding
childish things, especially if those things make us happy.
7/10
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