Video review: "The Secret LIfe of Pets 2"

Movies like “The Secret Life of Pets 2” are a perfect fit with home video, because they’re the sort of thing that kids will love and parents can use to buy themselves 86 minutes of precious free time.

I didn’t much care for either the first CGI animation film or this sequel, which basically takes the “Toy Story” concept and applies it to doggies, cats and a few other pet varieties. It’s a look at the adventures they have while we leave them at home.

Max, the Jack Russell Terrier voiced by Patton Oswalt, is more or less the protagonist, though Kevin Hart puts in a challenge as Snowball, an excitable rabbit who dresses like a superhero and starts to imagine he is one, too. Each goes off on their own adventure through the big city, with a third story thread headlined by Gidget, the snooty Pomeranian voiced by Jenny Slater.

I won’t belabor you with a plot summary, other than to say there’s a lot of chases, slightly scary encounters with some tough circus animals and more than a little gastrointestinal humor.

It’s middle-of-the-road moviemaking expressly aimed at kids.

I’m not advocating for skipping movies at the theater, which would render my endeavor rather moot, or with letting your television act as a 24/7 babysitter. What I am saying is that you should spend quality time with your kids, while acknowledging there will be times you need a break from them and a grandparent isn’t around.

Bonus features are quite good, and get better the higher up the price scale you go. The DVD edition includes two short films and accompanying making-of featurette; four deleted scenes; character “pods” highlighting each of the critters; a making-of documentary short; a puppy training school trip with Kevin Hart; tutorials on drawing and making a flip book; and a pets-themed “Yule Log” for the holidays.

Upgrade to the 4K/Blu-ray version and you add “The Further Adventures of Captain Snowball,” a motion comic highlighting the further adventures of the ersatz hero. Digital access-only content amounts to four more documentary shorts.

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Review: "The Secret Life of Pets 2"

"The Secret Life of Pets 2" is not made for me, or thee -- unless one of us is under the age of 10. In which case, I'll endeavor to keep the cursing in this review to a bare minimum.

Like the original film from three years ago, "Pets" is specifically and intentionally made for little kids to enjoy, and for parents to endure. During the screening whenever I started sighing or feeling my thoughts start to wander, I just looked over at my two boys, smiling and laughing their heads off.

Eighty-six minutes of intensely cute and predictable storytelling is not too much to endure for your children.

If anything, I like the sequel a little more than the first one. It splits up the action into three separate storylines, so just when one is getting a little tiresome it switches things up.

The main role of Max, voiced by Louis C.K., is taken over by Patton Oswalt (for #MeToo reasons). He's an excitable Jack Russell Terrier who's resistant to change. Duke, the big shaggy doofus voiced by Eric Stonestreet whose introduction into Max's household formed the basis of the first film's story, gets relegated to the backburner here.

A few years have passed and their woman has married and produced a baby, Liam, to whom the dogs are very attached. When the New York City family goes off for a vacation in the country at an uncle's farm, it sets all sorts of activities in motion.

Gidget, the cultured Pomeranian (voice of Jenny Slate) who pines for Max, is put in charge of his favorite toy, Busy Bee, but quickly loses it into the intimidating lair of the old lady downstairs who has a literal regiment of scary cats. To infiltrate this den of hiss, Gidget must disguise herself as a feline and learn the ways of the cat from her too-cool neighbor, Chloe (Lake Bell).

Meanwhile, uppity rabbit Snowball (Kevin Hart), who's really committed to playing super-hero dress-up with his girl, goes on his own mission. Befriending a Shih Tzu named Daisy (Tiffany Haddish), they rescue an albino tiger from a nasty circus owner (Nick Kroll). Then, of course, they've got to find somewhere to stash it.

Out on the farm, Duke and Max are impressed with the farm dog, Rooster, voiced with delicious gruffness by Harrison Ford. He's everything they are not: self-reliant, authoritative and master of other critters.

Rather than a typical movie dynamic, where Rooster resents the urban invaders and then gradually warms up to them, the country dog is more or less benevolent from the start. He's clearly annoyed by their lack of skill in essential dogginess, like herding sheep and howling at the moon. But Rooster sees Max not as a city slicker to be dismissed so much as a youngster in need of tutoring.

It's about as close to a blue state/red state bonding as we're apt to see in the movies these days.

Director Chris Renaud and Brian Lynch continue to ride their "Minions" formula: slapstick mixed with fart jokes and doe eyes. It's unsophisticated filmmaking for a kiddie audience, nothing more and nothing less.

You can bemoan that this type of movie exists, or pony up to the ticket booth and make your young'uns happy.

Review: "The Secret Life of Pets"

Colorful, boingy, copious critters, a robust emphasis on gastrointestinal humor -- if that’s not the perfect recipe for a little kids’ movie, then I don’t know what is.

Note I said “little kids’ movie,” not “family film,” because while “The Secret Life of Pets” is a strong entry in the former, it is not much in the way of the latter. What it mostly is is a sorta-sequel to “Minions,” made by the same people, with cartoony dogs and cats (a few birds and reptiles, too) swapped out for the lil’ yellow dudes.

Well, except these guys are understandable. It’s a “Toy Story” -ish conceit, about the adventures our pets go on when we’re not around. To humans their speech just sounds like barks and yelps and what have you, but they can all understand each other -- no inter-species language barrier here.

The story focuses on two dogs, Max and Duke, voiced by Louis C.K. and Eric Stonestreet. Max is a fun-loving little dude who has a cozy life in New York City with his owner, Katie (Ellie Kemper). But then one day she brings home Duke, an enormous brown ball of fluff from the shelter, and all bets are off as they vie for title of apartment alpha dog.

Through a whole lot of implausible contretemps, they’re lost in the city trying to find their way home. Meanwhile they are pursued by two groups. The first is a rescue mission led by Gidget (the adorably squeaky Jenny Slate), the white Pomeranian from across the way who secretly adores Max.

She throws together a ragtag group that includes Max’s other dog friends, a fat and lazy cat (Lake Bell), a parakeet, guinea pig and even a hawk (Albert Brooks), who tamps down his predatory instinct to help creatures he would usually snack on.

And that’s actually the normal team. The other, more antagonistic one is the Flushed Pets, a gang of discarded creatures who’ve sworn revenge on the human world that shunned them. They have a tattooed pig, a hairless and holey cat (Steve Coogan), several alligators, assorted lizards and fish and a large one-fanged viper. Their leader is Snowball (Kevin Hart), an excitable former magician’s rabbit with the heart of William Wallace and the combat skills of… a poofy little hare.

“Liberation forever, domestication never!” is his clarion call.

Director Chris Renaud, co-director Yarrow Cheney and screenwriters Ken Daurio, Brian Lynch and Cinco Paul pitch the material straight at the 3- to 8-year-old audience. For instance, there’s a dog party where they walk in a circle sniffing each other’s butts while exchanging pleasantries. (“Enchanté!”) A high point is a sequence where the dogs break into a sausage factory and gorge themselves, leading to pork-induced hallucinations and a musical number.

“The Secret Life of Dogs” is well-made, unambitious entertainment. It’s the sort of thing you appreciate being able to let your kids enjoy, while at the same time wishing it were permissible to go off and do something else.

(Drop-off theaters with supervised double-features of this and “The Angry Birds Movie”? Now that’s an upcharge parents would happily shell out for ahead of 3-D.)

Review: "Identity Thief"

For a movie that's essentially a gender-scrambled version of "Midnight Run," "Identity Thief" is an amiable rip-off.

Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy play familiar types for them -- he the nice, slightly stiff pushover; her the wild girl with an oversized personality and inability to distinguish when she's crossed the line of social decorum, which is pretty much always.

They get tossed together in an unlikely cross-country road trip, one a straight man and the other a charming scamp. We've seen this sort of casting before in "48 Hours," "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" and the aforementioned "Run."

The changeup is the antagonists-turned-buddies  are a mixed gender duo. I'd say this adds sexual tension, except that persnickety Sandy (Bateman) isn't even slightly tempted by the Diana, the plus-sized powerhouse who stole his identity.

The setup from screenwriter Craig Mazin is that Sandy, a drone at a Denver finance company, gets fooled by Diana into giving up his personal data. Soon she's collecting Jet Skis and buying the entire bar a round of drinks on Sandy's dime.

When the police (led by Morris Chestnut) put him in the clink and his boss (John Cho) threatens to can him for his supposed misdeeds, Sandy has no choice but to travel down to Florida, find the woman posing as him, and bring her back to Colorado for a reckoning.

(Actually, there are many other choices, but this is the sort of flight of fancy that demands you gate-check the logic centers of your brain before boarding.)

Sandy, who constantly gets kidded about his gender-unspecific name, leaves his devoted family to embark on this quest. He shows his wife (Amanda Peet) Diana's mugshot, pointing out her size as a way of reassurance. "It's hobbit height. I'm going after Bilbo."

It's an entirely predictable ride, with Diana turning out to be an unstable but somewhat pitiable creature. And she's got bigger troubles than Sandy, with no less than three bounty hunters after her. Robert Patrick is the best of the three, turning it into a personal grudge match when they wreck his clunker van. (The other two, an incongruously pretty pair played by T.I. and Genesis Rodriguez, should've been disposed of in rewrites.)

I got a few special chuckles regarding Sandy's complaints about having to travel to Winter Park, Fla., "pretty much the worst place in America" (and my hometown).

Their initial faceoff is a hoot, with Diana nailing Sandy with a karate chop to the neck -- she's wont to do that -- and giving what is probably the shortest foot chase in cinematic history.

As she did with "Bridesmaids," McCarthy takes a showy role and milks it for all it's worth, showing a sharp sense of comedic timing and a willingness to poke fun at herself. Although little moments here and there, like Diana catching on to the derisive sniggers of the posh set, clue us in that there's more depth than her brash, felonious exterior would suggest.

Director Seth Gordon leads his cast through their paces, never surprising us but nearly always entertaining. "Identity Theft" may be a carbon copy of other, better movies, but this facsimile still pleases.

3 stars out of four