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The Angry Birds Movie 2

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A scene in 'The Angry Birds Movie 2.' (NuMetro)
A scene in 'The Angry Birds Movie 2.' (NuMetro)

WHAT IT'S ABOUT:

Red, Chuck, Bomb and the rest of their feathered friends are surprised when a green pig suggests that they put aside their differences and unite to fight a common threat. Aggressive birds from an island covered in ice are planning to use an elaborate weapon to destroy the fowl and swine way of life. After picking their best and brightest, the birds and pigs come up with a scheme to infiltrate the island, deactivate the device and return to their respective paradises intact.

WHAT WE THOUGHT:

The first Angry Birds just dipped its toe into the crazy sauce as a movie based on a mobile game - but the sequel went and spilt it all over, sprinkling some acid on top. Animations normally have a blasé approach when it comes to the physics of reality, but the insanity of Angry Birds 2 will have you laugh in confusion while trying to work out if they just showed three baby chicks straight-up murder, someone.

The worst part is that it kind of works.

Unlike any of the games, a brand-new team of directors and writers decided to do something that’s never happened before - get the pigs and birds team up against a third island, set on destroying all they hold dear.

The first movie focused a lot on Easter Eggs and mechanics from the game, coupled with a straightforward plot of belonging. Angry Birds 2 however quietly kicked all of that out the door and set about concocting a new creation like some mad scientist. It felt like every writer wrote down every joke they could think off, threw it on a dartboard and wherever the dart landed went about creating an entire scene around it - and then spent almost their entire budget on the most random big-name songs that somehow makes it even funnier.

The returning characters are still pretty much the same, maybe a little less angry, but the crazier the situation around them the more they lose their grasp on it all and give in to insanity. The pig king was the only one, in the beginning, to embrace the craziness of it all, but to be fair, he was already the weirdest character of them all even from the first movie. There’s also a swath of new characters, including the sassy villain Zeta played by the delightful Leslie Jones. But the movie feels less like a coherent plot and more like a series of sketches, each contained within their own joke’s universe. The puns are innumerable; there’s a certain nihilistic humour that seeps through and a whole sidequest where a trio of adorable chicks go on a mission to find their missing sibling-eggs.

It’s clear that everyone involved had so much fun with this movie.

In the first Angry Birds, the studio played safe to make it a viable franchise, but for the second one, the creatives were let out of their cages to run wild and free. Kids will love it, adults will be weirdly amused by it, and even if you gag at the cash-grabbiness of it all, Angry Birds 2 clearly doesn’t care.


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