Is everything awesome? Indeed it is if you like your movies brightly coloured, packed with jokes and really quite loud. Almost five years after the first Lego movie impressed critics and entranced its target audience of families with young kids, its sequel blasts on to the screen and will probably not disappoint fans of the original.
Finn (Jadon Sand) hasn’t aged much and is still constructing elaborate Lego worlds, but rather than his dad and the evil Craggle glue threatening his creativity, it’s his little sister Bianca (Brooklynn Prince) and her candy coloured Duplo that form the clouds on his horizon. Threatened by their mother (Maya Rudolph) with an Ar-Mom-Aggedon that will entail all their bricks being banished to the dread Bin of StorAge if they don’t stop fighting, their sibling rivalry is played out in dazzling 3-D animation.
Screenwriters Phil Lord (also responsible for the cracking script for last year’s Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse) and Christopher Miller have done a great job at crafting a narrative that redresses the perennial criticism that Lego is too boy-centred. Lucy/Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) has been given a bigger role and there's a wonderfully villainous new character, Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi (Tiffany Haddish). She’s a shapeshifting temptress who has decided she wants to marry Batman (who’d prefer to remain a Bat Chelor but can’t resist the fluffy white wedding gear). Will Arnett does a great job as the Man of Bats, taking over considerable stretches of the narrative.
But it’s Haddish, relishing her role as "the least evil queen in history" (pictured above) who has some of the best songs and deserves a spin-off movie of her own. The film is littered with gags about action hero character licensing, trademarking and standalone projects. Chris Pratt does great voice work as Emmet Brickowski who is in a quandary about his masculinity while there’s a lovely cameo by Bruce Willis as Bruce Willis from the Die Hard era. Old friends like Abraham Lincoln, Unikitty and Gandalf pop up but there's some very 2019 additions like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a vampire who 'also DJs and likes to wear women's jeans' (voiced amusingly by Noel Fielding). Adult audiences will get their film buff credentials tickled with visual gags that reference movies from Planet of the Apes to 2001, Alien to Jurassic Park, The Wizard of Oz to the Matrix as well as all the (licenced) DC characters.
Like the original, The Lego Movie 2 will reward repeat viewing as the jokes - both in the dialogue and in the visuals - come thick and fast. If you share your life with small children and repeat viewing of their favourite film is your fate, you could do a lot worse than sit through it more than once as there's plenty of buried gags. I am very grateful that the ‘Catchy Song’ – with its repeated refrain “This song is gonna get stuck inside your head” is nowhere near as insidious as ‘Everything is Awesome‘, which still tops my chart of earworm torture tunes.
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