Review: The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

I think like many, I had low expectations for the first Lego Movie. I just assumed it would be a shameless way to promote the product.

But with directors and writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller at the helm, they once again proved me wrong with another one of their projects. The Lego Movie ended up being one of my favourite films of 2014.

Now only as writers for the sequel, I was pretty excited for the second installment. The Lego franchise has pretty good up to this point as I really enjoyed The Lego Batman Movie and The Lego Ninjago Movie was solid with a healthy amount of laughs.

While I think the novelty of the Lego concept somewhat wore off in this sequel, it was still a good time with many of its strengths that I liked in the original show up again in its follow-up.

The story moves along nicely, introduced many new characters without losing tempo and never making the viewer feel taken out by this crazy world of building. What was nice addition was a musical aspect to the story and the songs ended up being my biggest positive about the film. Much like the humor, the songs all have many self-referential lyrics and all of them I was wanting to listen to them again straight away, because they are very catchy. If you'll have seen the film, you'll that some songs are literally catchy.

Not much to mention on the voice performances as they all performed as well as they did in the first one. However, Chris Pratt was given more to do and coped with that well and showed noticeable range in his voice work.

The visual effects are still pleasing to the eye and the colour pallet is as striking as ever. I also still love the way the characters and objects move about as if it was done in stop-motion.

While I don't feel there are major negatives to speak of, there were aspects that only had me giving a good rating rather than a great one. The gags were hitting as high as before, the story did not feel as executed as well as it could've been as I think it sounds better on paper. But as said, these are just minor flaws.

On the whole, I thought this was a good fun time with enough laughs and a well developed story that felt worthy of making a sequel. I might not be wanting to re-watch as instantly as most previous Lego movies. But it is definitely a welcomed addition to the franchise.

Rating: 7/10