Movie Review: ‘Angry Birds The Movie 2’

Director: Thurop Van Orman

Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Josh Gad, Danny McBride, Leslie Jones, Bill Hader, Rachel Bloom, Awkwafina, Sterling K. Brown, Peter Dinklage

Plot: The residents of Bird and Piggy Islands must team-up to defeat a new foe attacking from Eagle Island.

Review: This week we’ve attended two movie sequels featuring the hilarious Bill Hader. One of them features nightmarish visuals, psychological horror and disturbing implications…and the other one is It: Chapter 2.

Yes, it’s an obvious joke, but it’s better material that what you’re going to get with Angry Birds The Movie 2.

There are only two things that happen in this sequel, and then they repeat themselves endlessly for the duration of the running time. First there’s a joke made about bums or something equally hilarious and then there’s a one-hit wonder pop song played for comedic value. There’s usually no joke attached to these songs, it would seem that their presence is enough to be considered a gag (to be fair, though, there was one adult who burst out laughing with each one…it was perplexing). The movie sounds like a Spotify One-Hit Wonder playlist – ‘Eye of the Tiger’, ‘Hello’, ‘Axel F.’, ‘I’m Too Sexy’, ‘The Final Countdown’, ‘Lovin’ You’, ‘All By Myself’…it’s as predictable as it is boring.

Ok, there is the very, very rare moment where they build a joke around something other than familiar pop songs. Take, for example, a scene where two of the characters are singing opera without any context and then…a third one starts singing opera. And that’s the full scene.

At this point you may be thinking that I’m being a bit mean about the humour in a kids film, but at this stage I’ve put more effort into it than they have. The Shrek movies have been given some flak for relying heavily on pop-culture references, but they would at least turn it into a pun or something. Angry Birds The Movie 2 just drops them in there with no context or punchline and considers it a job well done. There’s an extended joke about some characters singing ‘Baby Shark’, a children’s song made famous on YouTube.

In case you don’t get it, the joke here is that they sing ‘Baby Shark’. Hilarious, right?

The set up for all this rib-tickling good times is that an ongoing war has been happening between the birds and the pigs, mostly based around slingshotting various objects back and forth. Red (Sudeikis) is considered a hero and the birds have adopted his slingshots as their primary form of transport (in a somewhat clever bit of world building shown for about 30 seconds). When Piggy Island comes under attack from a new foe, an eagle tired of living in an icy wasteland, King Leonard (Hader) calls and a truce and the two islands out together a team to pull off a heist-like mission to destroy their shared enemy.

No part of the story or the humour cannot be predicted from the outset, nor is there any creativity on show. It will entertain younger children with the simple humour but there’s no reason for anyone else to seek this out. Most of the voice cast and animators are putting in a minimal effort, so should we.

Rating: TWO out of TEN