Indeed, the lively, loose-knit script wittily alludes to that film’s scant story with a blunt one-line summary at the outset: “Hey Red, isn’t it funny how nobody liked you until you saved Bird Island and now everybody loves you?” Once a cranky social outcast, Sharpie-browed Red ( Jason Sudeikis) now enters the sequel a revered local hero, no longer mad as he basks in public adoration and gleefully spearheads an ongoing prank battle against the birds’ sworn porcine enemies on Pig Island. Other names make less of an impression amid the sheer, busy sugar-blast of activity here: Awkwafina, Nicki Minaj, Tiffany Haddish and JoJo Siwa are among those serving as brief, bright, oh-wait-whose-voice-is-that background distractions, though the film does notably mark an unexpected debut for a pair of Hollywood hatchlings, Faith and Sunday Kidman-Urban.Īs for what it’s actually about, that’s as secondary a concern as it was first time round, even if the aforementioned antagonist - with her plan to take over the world, which in the compact Angry Birds realm now extends to three whole islands - gives proceedings slightly more shape than its predecessor’s frenzied, game-inspired war of attrition between fowl and swine. An all-star voice ensemble, meanwhile, has been considerably expanded and diversified from the first film’s male-dominated flock: Among the new additions, it’s Leslie Jones’ brassy, purple-plumed villainess, in particular, that gives the film wings. That increased flexibility mostly works to the film’s benefit, with Van Orman and the writers investing in more elaborate, inspired comic setpieces without referential in-jokery. We’re free, then, to drift into story worlds and digressions with nary a trace of the source material’s DNA, even as the plush, fluorescent finish of the animation (a gaudy-but-gorgeous alternative to Disney-Pixar refinement) keeps things true to the original game’s eye-scorching aesthetic. Where its predecessor contorted itself to work the game’s essential imagery and strategy into a shaggy narrative, the sequel persuasively cements the films as a franchise in their own right. How close “The Angry Birds Movie 2” comes to matching that figure will depend on how firmly the first film’s characters - considerably fleshed (or feathered) out from rudimentary smartphone avatars - have captured the collective imagination of a young public now a micro-generation removed from the game’s pop-cultural peak. Despite a complete replacement of the first film’s writing and directing teams - with acclaimed, offbeat TV animator Thurop Van Orman brashly taking the reins in his first feature assignment - this second loopy adventure for misfit cardinal Red and his feathered-but-flightless friends maintains the balance of scattergun jokes, candy-coated visuals and cheerfully bird-brained storytelling that raked in $350 million worldwide in 2016. Peace of any kind is in short supply in “ The Angry Birds Movie 2,” another breathless, frenetic cartoon escapade derived from the once-ubiquitous video game franchise, and again its manic, catapulting comic energy is more appealing than those origins might suggest. “For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson - though he reckoned without the Angry Birds making a virtue of that trade.
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