THE LEGO MOVIE 2 - THE SECOND PART (is Harder)

In the 5 years since The LEGO Movie, creative team Phil Lord and Chris Miller have - 

Wait. . . it's Been 5 years since the first LEGO Movie?

REALLY?

. . .I need to sit down.

How do you make a sequel to one of the most infamous "miraculous it wasn't a total creatively-bankrupt mess, let alone that it ended up a genuine masterpiece of modern animation and self-aware storytelling" examples of recent franchise-adjacent family filmmaking?

I mean, apart from "DON'T" - which is what conventional wisdom would say, But, if we've learned anything from the writer/director team of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street, The LEGO Movie and writer/producers of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse (aka, one of the best films of last year), it's that "conventional wisdom" is for cowards.

The Second Part opens after the invasion of the LEGO city of Bricksburg by aliens from the planet "Duploid," a conceit accomplished by the now-revealed fact that the entirety of the narrative, characterization, and thematic weight of the first film was driven by the imagination of a young child using his father's meticulously organized playsets to enact his own flights of fancy. Only now, having convinced his father that a rigid adherence to "order" and totalitarian control of resources isn't always the best idea (*psst* these movies are About Stuff), the young boy must now accept that his sister is now also allowed to play (hence, the DUPLO aliens), and that goes about as well as you'd expect.

In the LEGO world, 5 years have passed with the repeated alien attacks (apparently lured by cute and colorful building blocks) leaving the once-bright metropolis a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Returning heroes Emmet (Chris Pratt) and Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), along with the remaining Master Builders, have bunkered down (literally) in a place that could pass for a licensed Mad Max: Fury Road set, but while the punkish Lucy, aka "Wyldstyle," has embraced her battle-hardened existence with brooding intensity, Emmet has steadfastly refused to change, even going so far as to use the verboten materials that inevitably attract the mysterious attackers to build a new house - which does, in fact, attract aliens, and disaster ensues. In the aftermath, Emmet not only has to rescue his friends who've been kidnapped to the Systar System, but also faces the challenge of "growing up" to be the kind of tough, competent hero that his friends insist he must become in this new, darker world.

(*psst* these movies are About Stuff)

Of course, Emmet is hilariously outmatched in his quest until the arrival of Rex Dangervest (Chris Pratt by way of Kurt Russell's Jack Burton), a walking send-up of every blockbuster role of Pratt's career (including rumors and even fan-casts), who helps him on his quest. As Emmet races to reach his friends, Lucy attempts to escape while contending with the schemes of the alien Queen Watevra Wanabi (Tiffany Haddish, absolutely crushing it), solving the mystery of what happened to missing pieces and citizens of Bricksburg, and, well, to say more would be to give away the game. But where the first LEGO Movie's Big Idea was a rug-pull framing concept that re-contextualized the entire rest of the film, The Second Part goes for something similar with its central theme, in an even more subversive way.

There's a bit if narrative pretzeling that the film has to do in order to land its big punches, but once you've had to chance to see the whole board, as it were, everything lines up fairly well and - even if it didn't - I'm a fan of big swings. And this film packs quiet a few. I wasn't expecting Ralph Breaks the Internet to be a conscious takedown of toxic masculinity, and I definitely didn't anticipate this film to end up playing that number even better. Speaking of numbers, I wasn't expecting The LEGO Movie 2 to go full-on animated musical with an absolute banger of a track featuring Haddish that could stand next to songs like "Poor Unfortunate Souls" and "Mother Knows Best." And I REALLY wasn't expecting writers Lord & Miller and director Mike Mitchell (of Shrek 4 and the underrated Sky High) to not only address the vastly different "time periods" in which the two LEGO Movies were made, but to weave that seamlessly into the thematic heart of the film as well as the emotionally-charged "real world" sibling narrative.

Did I mention that these movies are About Stuff? Oh, and then there's the part of the movie that's essentially a rallying cry for weary millennials in the form of a riff on a familiar song and did these guys win a fiddle of gold from the devil or what?

The first movie spoke directly at the parents in the audience, warning of the hoarding of childish things at the expense of their children, and now this film turns its gaze to the younger target demographic. We must all grow up - doubtless some of the children who saw the first movie in theaters have had to do so depressingly in the past few years - but the film presents us with a very clear choice as to who we want to be when we do.

And that's pretty awesome.