Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 Review

It requires a lot of talent and creativity to take a children's picture book and turn it into a full length movie. That is exactly what Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs did. At first it doesn't sound like a good idea, but then you watch the movie and are super impressed. Not only is it a fun animated movie, but it has a really good story line, great characters, great character progression, and a lot of heart. When a second one was announced, I was quite skeptic because the first one seemed like a great stand-alone movie that didn't need a sequel. How did it turn out? Well, it's nowhere near as good as the first one, but it is actually worth a watch, especially if you have little kids.

If you never saw the first movie, I would highly recommend watching it. However, you technically don't need to see the first to follow what happens in the second one. The main reason for that is that in the first five minutes of the second movie it actually summarizes the first movie. You don't get that too often, but ok. But straightforward with things, what made the first one so brilliant, that being the story and the characters, was the biggest weakness for this one. In fact I would go as far to say that the story line in this one was outright stupid. Super boring and super predictable. Our villain was super lame. Also the characters went through no real progression and felt a lot more exaggerated and fake when compared to the first one. The creators of the movie has a ton of really fun ideas with this movie, and I will get to that in a second, but it was super disappointing because it was really obvious that they had no idea where to go with the story and what to do with the characters. It just fell super flat.

Despite that, however, this movie was far from a loss. If you saw any of the trailers, you'll know what the strength of the movie is because it is all the focused on in the trailers. That would be all the food puns and "foodimals" as the call them in the movie. It turns out it was smart of them to focus on that and nothing else because they really had nothing else to advertise. After seeing this in the trailers, I actually thought I would be really annoyed with the foodimals and food puns. Turns out I couldn't be more wrong because they were absolutely fantastic. The movie was loaded with puns the whole way through and it actually had me laughing quite a bit. A lot of the foodimals were super adorable, actually, and if you don't watch yourself, you might actually get cuteness poisoning. As an example, the strawberry is probably the best character in the movie. There comes a point where Flint needs to give a speech to the foodimals and since they can't hear him, the strawberry translates for him and during that I almost died with laughter and it was also super cute. Not all the foodimals were super cute, but they all were super fun and entertaining. And the final scenes in the movie were priceless.

Overall, I would definitely recommend that you give this movie a shot. Even though the story is super lame and the movie as a whole doesn't come close to matching the first one, the foodimals make up for it to a certain extent as they make the movie watchable. I would especially recommend this to you if you have young kids in your home. Kids around three to five years old don't need a good story, a good villain, or character progression to be entertained. The foodimals will do the job for them and make this a classic movie that they will love watching over and over again. As far as a grade goes, I can't rate it super high because of the flaws in it, but in my opinion a 7 out of 10 is fair.

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