Brick to the Future: THE LEGO MOVIE 2: THE SECOND PART

To make one LEGO Movie that’s a surprisingly sharp, cleverly constructed laugh-a-thon doubling as a sweet-tempered message about creativity is surprising enough. To do it again is some kind of miracle. In The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, returning screenwriters Phil Lord and Chris Miller, handing directorial efforts to Trolls’ Mike Mitchell, have built a pleasant and perceptive commercial comedy about sibling relationships. It’s couched in the garb of a post-apocalyptic parody, jumping off from the central metaphor of the first movie — a boy’s playland saga rendered in tiny bombast and Chosen One pastiche — and its winning final joke — his younger sister’s toddler-voiced Duplo blocks invading Bricksburg. Now, 5 years later, the first film’s characters are wallowing in young male adolescent fantasy, shirking the bright colors and poppy music for something more stereotypically brooding. The wasteland of destruction in which dopey Emmet (Chris Pratt), punkish Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), and surly egomaniacal Batman (Will Arnett) now live is a broad parody of the stunted mindset that views grim and gritty and self-consciously dark as inherently more mature storytelling. Trouble comes when the Sistar system sends alien invaders to capture all but Emmet, taking them through the Stair-gate to see their Queen Whatevra Wa’nabi (Tiffany Haddish) who has plans involving the impending Ourmomageddon. (Subtle, the movie ain’t.) So it’s Pratt to the rescue, though he’s so hapless he’s quickly greeted and assisted by a galaxy-defending, raptor-training doppleganger (get it?). The whole thing becomes a goof on dark sequels with bleak cliffhangers while doing its darnedest to actually dig deeper into its central premise. It’s definitely less surprising and clever on a moment to moment basis — mostly for the obvious ways it can’t replicate the original’s surprise factor — but is a sharper, wiser, cleverer, and more empathetic moral vision than before, baked into the very structure of its plot. It becomes a movie about a boy who needs to learn growing up doesn’t mean giving into toxic masculinity, like hiding behind a false rough exterior that can’t let his little sister in, and that it's okay to embrace complicated emotions. That the message is carried about by a zippy, flashy, colorful adventure movie filled with bouncy action, loopy sight gags, loony non sequiturs, and a handful of supremely catchy songs is all the better for its intended audience. It’s all of satisfying complete vision, a fun kids' movie with a moral that’s truly centered instead of tacked on. Unlike, say, The LEGO Batman Movie spin-off, which was only a clever self-referential Russian nesting doll of product placement, The LEGO Movie 2 manages to repeat the feat of its predecessor by being funny and sweet and low-key sentimental enough to achieve escape velocity from mere crass commercialism, by being a movie first and toy ad second. If we have to have these, they might as well be this much fun.