If you were a humble little Lego brick, you’d be afraid of the larger Lego Duplo bricks, wouldn’t you? From that simple psychological insight, The Lego Movie 2 builds an elaborate but fundamentally solid follow-up. This, despite a strange-even-by-cartoon-standards plot, which feels like a combination of Star Wars and Rainbow Brite. (Watch the trailer below.)
This time, Emmet Brickowski (Chris Pratt) teams up with a bold Han Solo–like buccaneer named Rex Dangervest (Pratt again). Their mission – an undertaking so dauntingly butch that Emmet dots his plastic skin with a marker to simulate stubble – is to save everyone from a technologically advanced alien queen, Watevra Wa’Nabi (Tiffany Haddish).
Overbearingly, suspiciously ingratiating, she presides over a candy-coloured court that includes a glitter-dusted vampire and a talking ice-cream cone. Her dark side, though, doesn’t seem much worse than a perverse romantic interest in the Dark Knight – she abducts Batman (Will Arnett), demanding he marry her.
Rex, meanwhile, is surrounded by an entourage of raptors (a nod to Pratt’s Jurassic Park films) who like to chase tennis balls. Somehow this all arrives at an emotionally satisfying conclusion, helped along by that deeper little-vs-big theme and some catchy songs, including one called “Catchy Song”.
We could probably develop a much longer argument about the opposing yet complementary impulses of creation and destruction in Lego play. But who has the
time or the bricks? (Out now) 4 stars
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