Although the movie has been in theaters for well over a month, I only recently got a chance to see the newest LEGO movie in the company of my eight-year-old son. Fully titled The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, the movie picks up pretty much right after the end of the first movie.
One of the things that made the first movie surprisingly enjoyable for adults, was the revelation that it was really a story within-a-story, with the meta-narrative of a boy playing with his dad’s LEGOs when he isn’t supposed to furnishing the framework for the internal story. Coming into this new movie, my main question was whether they’d continue that theme, or take an approach more like the LEGO Batman stand-alone movie which took place entirely within the LEGO universe.
I was pleasantly pleased to find that the former was true.
Without trying to spoil anything, the main overall theme of the new movie follows the boy from the first movie and his little sister. After the opening intro, we skip ahead five years, so that our main protagonist from the first movie is now twelve or thirteen, and his sister looks like she’s nine or ten. In short, the perfect ages where siblings both want to play together, and very much don’t want to be together at all.
That conflict is the central core of the movie. Can siblings learn to play together, or will their fighting over which one is following the “right” story trigger the dreaded “ItsOurMomApocolypse”, sending all of the LEGOs into the lightless Bins of Stor-age?
Since this is, at heart, a movie for children, it’s pretty safe that we can guess what the ultimate answer to the above question will be. That doesn’t change the value of the message, especially when it’s presented in a fun and reasonably subtle way that parents can remind their kids of later. Since I have multiple kids in the target age range for this movie, I definitely find those reminders rather helpful.
Parents will also enjoy the variety of one-liners and in jokes, character cameos from other WB properties, and subtle head nods that made the first movie fun to watch. This definitely isn’t a movie to sleep through while your kids are entertained for a couple of hours, at least not on a first viewing.
Not that I really give specific movie ratings, but I’ll give this one a five popcorns out of five, as something parents and kids can both enjoy, and parents can feel good about their kids rewatching a few hundred times.