Movie Review: The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

Michael's Movie Grade: B+

Review: While not as great as the first movie, this is an excellent film in its own right.


What this movie definitely has going for it is a clever and engrossing story and great characters. As predictable as this movie's story seems like it will be at first it delightfully takes it in unexpected and very well thought-out directions. Each plot twist makes perfect sense and even enhances what you have seen before. This movie also allows us to take a different look at the characters we thought we completely knew (except for Benny, he still only likes spaceships). Sometimes this is done for reasons of humor and other times much more seriously. We see how these characters could have become somebody completely different if only they had done things a little differently. While it has become a cliché in current animated movies to have a message about being yourself no matter what, many of them don't use that message as well as it is used here. Perfect for a movie about Legos, we see here that we shouldn't always repress the more childlike parts of our personality to become what society says we should be. Maybe just because the world becomes tougher and more cynical that doesn't mean we have to get rid of everything that is not cynical about us. There is a power to optimism and that is what this movie speaks to most of all. This is deeper than the usual be yourself message you find in most of these films and is important to keep in mind as the world's cynicism seems to be growing and innocence seems to be dying. This movie also contains a great message about the importance of embracing and understanding the differences between us and our loved ones. All these messages are told in a way that never feels preachy or out of place, but rather it all flows naturally from the storyline in an entertaining way.


The humor is both a fault and a strength of this movie. This movie can be a bit too eager to please at times and will just throw joke after joke after joke at us. There are many laugh out loud funny moments in this movie and many of them are extremely clever. However with the bigrade of jokes there are quite a few that don't hit as well. Jokes like the Queen singing about how she is not evil, the methods of "brainwashing," the sheer amount of things Rex Dangerfield says he is, the dialogue between the raptors and the song over the closing credits are absolutely hilarious. However jokes like the intermission, and a banana tripping over his own peel, seem to do nothing but be unneeded and unfunny breaks in the story, that couldn't feel more out of place. Also references to the Everything is Awesome song are not funny, but instead forced as if they just wanted to remind us how memorable that part of the first movie was without any of what made it memorable.

Again though this is certainly an excellent movie in its own right.

-Michael J. Ruhland