It took five years to make a sequel to “The LEGO Movie,” but that apparently wasn’t enough time to come with anything more original. This is basically a rehash of the smash animated flick based on the ubiquitous building toys, which most parents are convinced are secretly designed to cause maximum pain when stepped on.
Emmet (voice of Chris Pratt), the everyman hero from the first movie, finds himself shunted aside after his cheery savior shtick has worn thin. The world has become very apocalypse-y in the years since, with daily attacks by brightly-colored aliens.
As you may recall, the toys are living out their lives at the direction of real-world human kids, in this case a brother and sister whose animosity gets played out in the toy realm.
Transported to the aliens’ world, Pratt and his crew --Wildstyle (Elizabeth Banks), Unikitty (Alison Brie), MetalBeard (Nick Offerman) and Benny (Charlie Day) -- find themselves faced with a proposed alliance. Specifically, their leader, Queen Watevra Wa-Nabi (Tiffany Haddish) wants to put a ring on it with the earthlings’ brooding Batman (Will Arnett).
Face-paced to the point of incoherence, “The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part” is made strictly for the kids.
Bonus features are quite good. They include a commentary track by the filmmakers, a sing-along version that includes trivia and games, a music video for the song “Super Cool,” deleted scenes and outtakes, plus several making-of documentary shorts.
There’s a moment that arrives for each of us when we first truly feel old.
Maybe it’s flailing at some athletic endeavor that barely made you break a sweat back in the day. Or it’s a cultural disconnect, when you realize you not only don’t like the music that’s popular right now, but you can’t even name a top artist or song.
For me it was 2014’s “The Lego Movie.” My then-3-year-old found it to be wonderfully zippy, colorful and fun. Although I liked the film, I spent most of it mentally shouting, “Please slow down, this movie is going way too fast for me to follow!!”
Though it’s more palatable on subsequent viewings -- especially on video where you can pause and rewind -- the movie throws so much visual and verbal information at you at once, it can be an overwhelming experience for us past-young folks.
The sequel, “The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part,” doubles down on the blazing incomprehensibility. My son, now 8, declares it even better than the original. My eyes and brain, now five years older, had an even harder time keeping pace.
Though there are certainly some enjoyable sections and throwaway jokes aimed at adults, this is a movie strictly for the kids.
The story picks up exactly where the last left off. If you’ll recall, the LEGO figurines were acting out a version of the playtime of a human father and son, in a very “Toy Story” kind of way. Dad finally learned to let go and allow his son to mess up his elaborate LEGO sets, but since he was letting him play with the stuff it was only fair to bring in his kid sister, too.
Turns out the siblings (Jadon Sand and Brooklynn Prince) did not get along. The utopian LEGO wonderland created by the fall of Lord Business has morphed into a Mad Max-like wasteland dubbed “Apocalypseburg” in which the sullen inhabits fight off near-daily invasions by cutesy aliens courtesy of sister’s more bedazzled imagination.
Emmet (voice of Chris Pratt), the everyman hero whose quest was all about finding out whether he was special -- hint: we all are -- is now seen as hopelessly out of touch. Even his lady friend, Lucy/Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), tells him he needs to grow up and get grimmer. Batman (Will Arnett) is their new savior since he’s already sufficiently dark and brooding.
The trio and a few other key team members -- robot/pirate MetalBeard (Nick Offerman), spaceship-obsessed Benny (Charlie Day) and bipolar unicorn/feline Unikitty (Alison Brie) -- are whisked away to the Systar System where they must face off with their counterparts. But it turns out their leader, shapeshifting Queen Watevra Wa-Nabi (say it out loud), voiced by Tiffany Haddish, is proposing an alliance.
Another newcomer is Rex Dangervest, a dashing adventurer also voiced by Pratt who gives Emmet advice about growing up and being more manly. The joke is that Rex is a mash-up of Pratt’s other big-screen roles as a raptor trainer, space hero and cowboy.
There are a few fun musical sequences, with a new earworm to replace the “Everything Is Awesome” song from the last movie, which also gets a somewhat moody reprise. Haddish gets her own tune, and turns out to be surprisingly more mellifluous than you’d think based on her comedy persona.
“The LEGO Movie 2” is pretty much more of the same. If you’ve seen any of the other LEGO movies you know what you’re getting, and that your kids will undoubtedly like it, and you’ll feel a little dazed after watching it. Take heart that this will be them someday.
“Love & Mercy” is an unconventional biopic about an unconventional musician. Brian Wilson was a self-taught prodigy who composed Billboard Top 10 hits for the Beach Boys of increasing musical complexity, even as his personal life sank into a morass of drugs, harmful relationships and mental illness.
Director Bill Pohlad, a veteran producer stepping behind the camera, and screenwriters Michael A. Lerner and Oren Moverman, set the story in two distinct points in Wilson’s life, the mid-1960s and mid-80s, and cast a pair of different actors to play him. The performances don’t match, deliberately so, since they’re showing Wilson as he descended into his two-decade period of purgatory, and then trying to climb out of it.
Paul Dano portrays Wilson as a young man looking to break out of the mold of flighty songs about girls, surfing and cars – much to the consternation of his brothers, bandmates and controlling father, who just want the hits to keep on coming.
John Cusack plays him in early middle age, struggling to break free of his torpor and reenter the world, with the help of a tough-but-tender Cadillac saleswoman (Elizabeth Banks) who acts as his touchstone.
Serving as the anchor is Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), the Machiavellian psychiatrist who kept Wilson under virtual lock and key for years, deciding where he would go and with whom he would associate. As good as Giamatti was as the conniving manager in “Straight Outta Compton,” you should be aware it was his second – and second-best – portrayal of an infamous musical Svengali this year.
The movie really sings during the studio sessions where Wilson created the album “Pet Sounds” essentially in secret, using professional musicians instead of his siblings’ barely competent guitars and drums. Wilson is trying to replicate the sounds and voices he hears in his head, and funnel the burgeoning madness into what would become one of the greatest pop records of all time.
“Love & Mercy” is a stunning portrait of a man who made beautiful music while suffering a tragic existence. This discord is finely in tune.
Bonus features are agreeable, and are the same for Blu-ray and DVD editions. There are two making-of featurettes, “A California Story: Creating the Look of ‘Love & Mercy’” and “A-Side/B-Side: Portraying the Life of Brian Wilson.” There are also deleted scenes and a feature-length commentary track by Pohlad and Moverman.
Not everything is awesome about “The Lego Movie” -- despite the assertion of that obsessively earworm-y song from Tegan and Sara featured in the kiddie animated flick from earlier this year. However, it is a boingy, entertaining thrill ride that is sure to keep younger children occupied for a goodly chunk of their summer vacation.
It might get old pretty quick for parents – I’ve already watched it three times with my 3½-year-old, and am ready to bring a book to our next couch time together. But this hyperactive flick isn’t made for oldsters.
Told mostly in Lego format, with the people, places and things made up of the iconic construction toys, the film follows the adventures of Emmet (spiffily voiced by Chris Pratt). A normal, generic, rather anonymous worker, he lives in a world where everyone follows the rules of their banal society.
Then he falls in with Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a member of the gang of Master Builder insurgents rebelling against the tyrannical Lord Business (Will Ferrell), who hates it when people use their imaginations rather than following the instructions that come with each Lego set.
There’s also a wise wizard (Morgan Freeman), a cop who’s both good and bad (Liam Neeson), pirate/robot Metal Beard (Nick Offerman) and Batman (Will Arnett), who’s additionally Wyldstyle’s bad-boy beau.
The animation is funky, and funny. It’s meant to look low-tech, as if everything really were made of the blocky toys. So the characters have drawn-on faces (watch out for nail polish remover!) and claw hands. Yet the computer-generated look is flashy and textured. I loved how when Emmet takes a shower, blue blocks representing water spill over his body.
Just like the song, “The Lego Movie” will grow increasingly irritating with repetition. But your kids will enjoy it the first time, and the 47th.
The movie comes with a host of video extras, including a feature-length commentary track. There are also outtakes, deleted scenes, storyboards, animations tests, making-of featurettes and spotlights on particular characters like Batman. There are even short movies made by fans using Lego blocks.
The problem with many fantasy book franchises that get turned into a series of movies is the individual films often seem much like one another. I enjoyed the first couple of “Harry Potter” flicks, but by the time the third one rolled around I felt like I’d already paid enough for the same dance.
“The Hunger Games” only needs two films to arrive at dreary repetition. “Catching Fire,” the sequel to 2012’s mega-hit, unrolls in very much the same fashion, culminating with gladiator-like games where young champions vie to kill each other off while an agitated populace is forced to watch on TV.
The only real difference is that Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is no longer an unknown novice from a remote district, but the reigning champion along with her childhood friend Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), with whom she carries on a faux romance for the benefit of the cameras.
She’s recruited (aka forced) to participate in a new set of games featuring former champions by the evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland), who fears Katniss has become the lynchpin of a brewing rebellion. He’s even hired a new Games Master, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), to devise insanely diabolical challenges for the competitors.
Katniss and Peeta quickly find themselves in an unlikely alliance with other players, but at times it seems like the very environment is out to get them.
“Catching Fire” isn’t bad, but it takes a long time to get going, and even when it does we’ve already seen all there is to see.
Video extras are decent enough. The DVD version comes with a feature-length commentary track by director Francis Lawrence and producer Nina Jacobson and deleted scenes.
Go for the Blu-ray combo pack, and you add a nine-part feature-length documentary about the making of the film, “Surviving the Game: Making Catching Fire.”
(Note: “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” will be released on video Friday, March 7.)
"The Lego Movie" is utterly forgettable but also undeniably fun. It's aimed straight at the single-digit age group, and is so fast-paced that older, slower minds may have trouble following all the action. But as disposable entertainment for kids, its hits its mark square-on.
If you're not aware of the franchise of Lego entertainment based on the iconic snap-together toys, then you must have had your head buried or not be a parent to young children. Often used to recreate populist favorites like Star Wars, they are near-ubiquitous in videos and gaming. Those little Lego-people with blocky bodies torsos and hook hands are the stars.
This is the first feature film featuring the yellow gang, and they've brought in a team of animation veterans with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller ("Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"), who co-wrote and -directed. They keep the movie bright, light and zany.
The set-up is rather cute: all the people live in a multi-faceted universe divided up into realms that match various Lego theme sets -- medieval, pirates, wild West, etc. All are ruled by Lord Business (voice by Will Ferrell), who likes for everything to be put together exactly according to the instructions to match the pictures on the front of the box. Any "weird stuff" is perpetually torn down and rebuilt.
Emmet (a terrific Chris Pratt) is an ordinary construction work -- so ordinary, in fact, that he's virtually indistinguishable from the crowd and doesn't have any friends. But like all the others he's been brainwashed into a life of superficial happiness, where everyone watches the same TV show ("Where Are My Pants?"), eats only at chain restaurants and sing and dance to the same omnipresent song ("Everything Is Awesome!", which actually is catchy in a supremely annoying way.)
But there is a rebellion afoot led by the Master Builders -- figures who can instantly piece together complex objects and vehicles from the various Lego pieces lying about. Emmet stumbles right into their plot and finds himself stuck to the Piece of Resistance, a nondescript block, that marks him as the Chosen One who will lead the overthrow of the tyrannical Business.
Trouble is, Emmet is such an unimaginative, vanilla type of guy that he seems to lack the basic skill set of a savior. A better choice would be Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a super-smart and talented rainbow-haired rebel who hitches on as Emmet's resentful sidekick.
Emmet is soon smitten by her, though she's in a committed relationship with her boyfriend, Batman ... yes, the Batman, deliciously voiced by Will Arnett. In this universe, anybody can appear in Lego form, so Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern also make cameos.
Rounding out the cast are Morgan Freeman as Vitruvius, an old sage and prophet; Nick Offerman as pirate/robot Metalbeard; Liam Neeson as Bad Cop/Good Cop, whose mood is determined by which way his head is turned; Uni-Kitty (Alison Brie), a cat/unicorn hybrid; and Benny, a "1980s space guy" voiced by Charlie Day.
The animation looks deceptively simplistic at first, since everything and everyone is made up of Lego parts. But the CG is actually quite detailed, and the pieces fly together so quickly it must have been a chore to animate.
"The Lego Movie" surprises with its carefree attitude and zippy antics. This won't make anyone's best-of list, but as throwaway entertainment during cinema's frigid season, it's a superb fit.
"The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" isn't any worse than the smash hit from last year, but that isn't really saying very much. This overly faithful adaption of the super-popular young adult novels by Suzanne Collins returns brave heroine Katniss Everdeen for another go-around that plays in large part like a broken record.
The tearful selection to the Games, in which champions from a dystopian America's 12 districts must fight gladiator-style for all the world to watch? It's here. The blunt tutoring by burnt-out former victor Haymitch (Woody Harrelson)? Ditto. Costumed pageantry and a gleeful skewering of our celebrity-obsessed media? Loved ones in peril? Sneering resentment by other, pampered, champions? Here, here, here.
And of course, the actual games themselves, which take up the latter half of the film. Once the action starts things pick up well, but it's a long, long slog until the arrows start flying.
The only real difference here is that the stirrings of rebellion against evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland) have blossomed after Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and her district partner, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), managed to defy all expectations and win the last Games together. Snow believes she's the face of the rebellion, and would snuff her out if he didn't fear that would stoke unrest even more.
He recruits a new Games Master, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), to come up with a devilishly sadistic scenario for the 75th annual games centered around bringing back past victors. It's all just an excuse to put Katniss in peril.
We get the familiar scenes of the champions at practice, making threats and showing off their killer muscle definition. There's a pair of Aryan siblings, some older scientist types, a gal who files her teeth to jagged points, a mentally unhinged chick with an axe, an anonymous big bald dude, and a scattering of others who are quickly forgotten or killed off.
Chief among the new arrivals is Finnick (Sam Claflin), a golden boy who seems to absolutely smack his lips at the prospect of going up against Katniss and Peeta.
The love triangle from the last film continues, again without much resolution. Katniss loves Gale (Liam Hemsworth), a stolid miner from back home, while Peeta is hopelessly smitten by her. They continue their supposed romance for the benefit of the cameras, even concocting up a planned wedding. It's taken its toll on Peeta, though, who wants to sacrifice himself to save his unrequited lady love.
New director Francis Lawrence has a good eye for the action scenes, but anytime the characters have to just stand there and talk to each other, it's pure death. It's a turgid, curiously emotionless affair -- something you'd think would be difficult, given all the death and ardor being flung around.
"The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" will likely please its molten core of fans, mostly teen girls. But I found it to be a fantasy-adventure soap opera, where clothes and media gossip get just as much play as the battles to the death.
"People Like Us" is a tearjerker, and is pretty straightforward about it. I don't have an issue with movies that don't pretend to be something other than what they are. Where I do have a problem is when they aren't successful at it.
To wit: no tears of mine were jerked by this movie.
Speaking of jerks: "People Like Us" is filled with them. At some point during the film I kept thinking, "Wow, I really hope there aren't a lot of people like them in the real world." If there are, this is one sad, bitter little globe we're riding as it hurtles through space.
This wannabe-weepy drama is about a young jerk who is the son of an old jerk who up and dies, leaving young jerk with only bitter memories of old jerk. That, plus a shaving bag filled with $150,000 in cash and a terse note instructing him to deliver it to a single mother who turns out to be the sister he never knew he had.
Young jerk, whose actual name is Sam, is in a tough spot because he could really use the money himself. His gig is "corporate bartering," which means buying up overstock of various goods and sundries and trading it for something else. Except Sam bartered a little too fast and loose, and now the feds are breathing down his neck about some rotten tomatoes, or something.
(Quick aside: the federal inquiry is instigated by an unhappy client -- the one with the tomatoes -- and the investigator starts calling Sam and his boss the very same day it's reported to tell them they're being investigated. That's a pretty responsive bureaucracy.)
Anyway, rather than telling the woman, whose name is Frankie, the whole deal and plopping the money down, Sam start following her around, and also her 11-year-old son Josh. He does said stalking while driving his father's fire engine red 1972 Mercury Marquis convertible, a great flaming beast of a car, which somehow does not attract anyone's attention.
Soon Sam has ingratiated himself into their lives, becoming a father figure to young Josh and a support system for Frankie, who's a recovering alcoholic working as a bartender (a Hollywood fabrication, if ever there was one).
The problem with this plot is that it's one of those stories that pivots entirely on the fulcrum of the One Big Lie. An untruth is told -- or as in this case the truth is withheld -- and the rest of the movie turns into an exercise in waiting around until the moment when everything is revealed. So the only real surprise is in seeing how extreme the reaction to the truth will be. (In this case, it's over the top.)
The screenplay is by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jody Lambert, who inform us this was "inspired by true life." Kurtzman, a TV veteran, directs with little sense of rhythm. The movie turns into a push-pull of characters coming together, then pushing each other away, then back again. It feels like a collection of encounters rather than a knitted whole.
The cast seems a little too perfect for their own good. Chris Pine as Sam brings little to the table that we haven't seen from other rogue-with-good-intentions characters. Elizabeth Banks plays Frankie with more success, as a tough woman putting up a good front over her nagging fears that she's a terrible person and a worse mother. Both are made-up to look scruffy and well-worn, but in a gorgeous Hollywood sort of way.
Michael Hall D'Addario is convincing as Josh, using spot-on facial expressions to show how he reacts to the adults around him with disdain or enthusiasm, depending on what mood strikes. Kids that age are like a combination safe, and few parents get it right more than once in a while.
Michelle Pfeiffer and Olivia Wilde have underwritten roles as, respectively, Sam's mom and girlfriend. They're composed less as flesh-and-blood people than as tools to facilitate Sam's emotional journey -- even if they have to behave illogically to do so.
"People Like Us" is the sort of story that would have worked better as a tiny-budget indie film with actors you never heard of. It feels like a meal that's been jazzed up with too much flimflam and unnecessary seasoning, instead of concentrating on blending a few key ingredients well.
Rather than making the audience sad, it makes us feel sad for it.
Unless you're pretty slow on the uptake, you already know that "What to Expect When You're Expecting" bears little relation to the self-help book aimed at educating pregnant women about the little darlings growing in their bellies.
In fact, it's such a deliberate departure, one wonders why the producers insisted on keeping the title, other than nefarious purposes to lure in millions of moms and mama wannabes, who don't really require much luring for bubbly romantic comedies.
Of course, this is the same industry that is also this week releasing a movie based on a board game about sinking military naval vessels, so starting off assuming the worst is probably going to work out pretty well.
There is no advice to be contained in the movie version of "WTEWYE," which is what I will call it henceforth, since I don't feel like typing it all, plus it seems like that would come out "wha-TOO-wee," which is good aural representation of how I felt about it.
Directed by Kirk Jones from a script by Shauna Cross and Heather Hache, "WTEWYE" feels like it was cooked up in a Hollywood laboratory ruled by poll-testing tubes and focus group beakers. Despite this, there actually are a few moments that shine.
The story takes a disparate group of five women, loosely interconnected and located mostly in Atlanta, who learn they're to become mothers right around the same time. There are also their male counterparts, plus friends, relatives, various hangers-on and a walk-on by some unrelated fathers known simply as The Dudes Group (more on them in a bit).
Now, that is a whole heapin' lot of characters to keep straight, let alone make them believable and identifiable. The result is that one couple's story works so well that I was annoyed whenever the movie focuses elsewhere, two other orbits of pregnancy feel forced and faked, another is really just a secondary story to the first one, and the last one has no purpose for even existing.
A quick run-down:
Jules (Cameron Diaz) is a celebrity fitness trainer who just won a "Dancing with the Stars"-type reality show and fell in love with her gorgeous dancer to boot. They're rich, famous and busy, and find there's not much they truly agree upon.
Wendy (Elizabeth Banks) runs a store called The Breast Choice devoted to everything about having a baby, but she and her hubby Gary (Ben Falcone) have had trouble conceiving on their own.
Gary's dad Ramsey (Dennis Quaid), a retired race car driver, knocks up his second wife with twins. She's younger than Gary, a plastic-y Barbie type who makes pregnancy look like a breeze.
Holly (Jennifer Lopez) and Alex (Rodrigo Santoro) can't get pregnant, so they look to adopt a baby from Ethiopia. Alex is getting cold feet, which gives Holly the jitters.
The last couple is Rosie (Anna Kendrick) and Marco (Chace Crawford), early-20s owners of competing food trucks and recovering from a high-school split. They get back together for a one-nighter, she gets knocked up, and then they have a lot of Very Important discussions to share.
I genuinely enjoyed the Wendy/Gary storyline, with Banks getting some of the best lines and scenes as a woman who's spent her adult life pushing the motherhood-is-magic theme, only to find it's more about cankles and hemorrhoids. "I didn't get 'The Glow,' I just got bacne."
The one with the young kids is given the shortest shrift, which is OK since it feels like it was only included to rope in a certain demographic.
The Dudes, a club for dads to hang out with their kids, are also worth a laugh or two, with their mantra of total acceptance of each other's substandard parenting. But their sequences bring the movie to a dead stop.
I wasn't expecting much from "WTEWYE," but audiences certainly deserved more than this.
1.5 stars out of four
So there he is, that man out here on the ledge. From the very first moments we glimpse him, we know that the hero in "Man on a Ledge" does not intend to jump off the 21st floor of a swanky Manhattan hotel. He's up to something, that man, whose name turns out to be Nick Cassidy, and is played by Sam Worthington. That something involves making everyone think he's suicidal, including the cops trying to talk him down and the people on the street, who would also like him to come down -- but quicker.
This is not some deep-think drama or character study. "Man on a Ledge" wants to be a fun and zippy thriller, part heist flick and part revenge catharsis. And it mostly carries out its intentions adeptly, under the direction of Asger Leth, a novice to feature films, and screenwriter Pablo F. Fenjves, a television veteran.
At first the break-in appears to be a straight high-tech infiltration/robbery, with people dangling from ropes to avoid laser alarms, faking out sophisticated security cameras with simple ruses, etc. We've seen it all before, and other than a few clever twists, it doesn't hold our attention long.
But there's obviously more going on here. The guy they're robbing, David Englander, is an evil real estate tycoon played by Ed Harris, who exploits his steely blue eyes and creased visage with expert, if overly familiar, flair. Nick is looking to get back at Englander for something, but what?
It's the job of Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks) to find out. A police negotiator who recently had a high-profile failure on the job, she's specifically requested by Nick to be the one talking to him. Her semi-willing partner is played by Edward Burns, in standard tough-New Yorker mode.
Nick and Lydia establish a connection, but she senses that she's being played. First her mission is merely to learn his real name and identity. Later, it will be to decide who to trust.
Rounding out the cast are Titus Welliver as the officer in command of the scene, Anthony Mackie as a cop who's an old friend of Nick's, William Sadler as a curiously omnipresent hotel worker and Kyra Sedgwick as a TV reporter with an incongruous surname and accent.
I didn't dislike "Man on a Ledge," but its moving parts all fit together a little too neatly and predictably for me to really enjoy.
