The Angry Birds Movie 2 Review

Because this is the sequel everyone was looking forward to. "The Angry Birds Movie" came out back in summer 2016, which was already passed the popularity of the app game. Admittedly, "Angry Birds" was an extremely addicting app, and one of the most popular app games, but it was first released way back in 2009. When 2016 came around, it was already a stretch to release it given that "Angry Birds" was past its prime. And now is there anyone in 2019 still playing the game? Well, maybe. Turns out Wikipedia informs me that there's 18 different "Angry Birds" games in the main series, as well as seven spin-off games. The latest one was released two months ago, that being "Angry Birds Explore" in June 2019, so I guess there's some sort of audience. But I went to my app store (for my Android tablet) and the first "Angry Birds" game that showed up on the top free app games list was "Angry Birds 2" at No. 71. In fact, I kept scrolling to see where the others were and out of 513 games on the list, the only other "Angry Birds" game that made the list was "Angry Birds Friends" at No. 316. So yeah, it's the perfect time to release a sequel to that "Angry Birds" movie that came out three years ago, right? It's definitely going to give Sony Pictures Animation more positive vibes.

Truth be told, "The Angry Birds Movie" has almost completely left my mind. I remember being one of the few people that watched the initial trailer and thought it could be a fun movie. But then the movie itself came out and I got burned pretty hard as it turns out the rest of the world was right when they thought it was a bad idea. I remember the movie being a really dirty kids movie that bored the tar out of me, but I don't remember much about it. I went back and read my review and learned that I spent most of the review complaining about the lack of an interesting plot, which makes sense because the game is a mindless app game where you launch birds at pigs. It's not the type of thing that was meant to be adapted into a full-length movie. Also in reading that review, let's just be glad that movie adaptations of "Temple Run," "Tetris," "Fruit Ninja," "Monopoly" and "Settlers of Catan" ended up not being a thing, because I mentioned there in that review that said movies had been announced. Maybe Hollywood learned their lesson that games without plots shouldn't be turned into movies. Although not everyone in Hollywood has learned their lesson as Sony Pictures Animation went onto make "The Emoji Movie" in 2017 and now have released this movie in 2019.

I suppose one could say that Sony Animation is like that friend who is still sharing Harlem Shake videos. They haven't quite kept up with what they should be doing. Funny enough, the also made "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" last year, which now looks more like a fluke than anything. I was almost worried there that the Sony Animation I knew had disappeared and become a competent animation studio. Who am I supposed to continually make fun of if Sony Animation learns how to properly make movies? I guess Illumination could take that crown because they've been a train wreck lately when it comes to quality. But it appears that Sony Animation is back to their usual selves, making awful animated movies for me to make fun of because "Angry Birds 2" is another disaster that I found even more annoying than the original film, which is kinda what I was expecting. So why did I see it when I knew this would be the case? I don't know. I tried to come up with multiple excuses in my head while watching, but the most honest answer is simply that reviewing movies is what I do. And this movie came out on a Tuesday instead of a Friday, so when I randomly had a day off that I wasn't expecting, I threw in the towel and went into a matinee showing to get this one over with to give me a jump start on this weekend's movies.

The plot? Yeah, if 2016 me had an issue with the plot of the first movie, 2019 me is in for a world of fun because this movie is completely bonkers. I mean, to heck with an "Angry Birds" movie doing "Angry Birds" things. Instead of having evil, raunchy pigs running around, causing the birds to launch themselves at the pigs' base, they all decide to be friends because an angry purple eagle, upset at the fact that her fiance stood her up at their wedding, and tired of the fact that she lives on a frozen island, decides that she's going to destroy both the pigs' and the birds' island so that she can take over and use it as her summer paradise. Instead of, you know, flying somewhere else. Maybe in this universe these are just the only two islands in existence, giving purple eagle nowhere else to fly. I don't know. Logic isn't this movie's strong suit. I suppose that's not completely necessary in a kids movie, but it would've been nice if the filmmakers showed that they actually cared. They just simply opened the box of "What to do in a generic kids movie" and rolled with it, using the first idea suggested to them from one of their five-year-olds as a loose plot structure, while taking lots of inspiration from that awful first movie, in hopes to make their bosses at Sony happy.

The movie didn't have much character development. We just gathered together our main characters from the first movie, added a few more for style, teamed them up with their pig enemies, and sent them all on a random adventure. OK, sure, I'll back track a little bit. Red, our main bird, has a bit of development. He's so obsessed with his newly found fame as a hero of bird island that he is dead set on doing everything himself instead of working as a team to find a solution. And the movie's big lesson is that he learns how to work as a team player instead of having to do everything himself. But that's it. Yet even that feels like generic kid movie stuff and his arc wasn't even as interesting as in the first movie. The rest of the movie is just all of the characters doing things. The movie doesn't feel like it has a connected plot. It's just a thousand smaller sequences all strung together, each of them hoping to spark a reaction from the kids in the audience. In fact, most of the things that happen in the movie don't even serve a purpose to the overall plot. There's even a huge subplot involving a trio of young birds searching for some lost bird eggs that's completely pointless and only loosely connects to the main plot at the end. Even most of what our main characters do serves little purpose.

Ultimately everything that happens feels extremely juvenile. We only spend a few brief minutes at the beginning doing "Angry Birds" stuff. You know, birds launching things at the pigs and vice versa. But that almost feels obligatory. They just used all of these characters to do random juvenile things. Every five minutes there's a dance sequence with a pop song that lasts 30 seconds. I got the feeling that this was a very expensive movie just because of how much money they had to be paying all of these music studios for the rights to use all of these songs. None of them really have a purpose outside being a poppy song for the kids to laugh at. If you're ready for your kids to be singing "Baby Shark" all day, there's even a dance off to that song. There's also plenty of toilet humor for the young kids to laugh at. It's not quite as dirty as the first movie, but they still can't help themselves with all the poop, fart, and pee jokes, as well as showing as many pig and bird butts as they can, because, you know, that's super funny, even though pigs and birds don't have human-like butts. These ones do, though.The movie also thinks it's extremely funny by cracking jokes the entire run time while practically pausing to wait for a reaction. Yet I don't think I even laughed once.

To close this review off, I'm going to use an obscure football reference. One of the more well-known press conference blow-ups was with the Cardinals coach after a loss to the Bears where he yelled "They are who we thought they were! And we let them off the hook!" If you don't know what I'm talking about, look it up. That was going through my head because I tricked myself into thinking that maybe this movie could surprise me. I didn't like the first movie. I didn't like the idea of them doing a sequel. I didn't like any of the trailers. Yet I saw the positive score on Rotten Tomatoes (currently a 72 percent with 61 reviews counted) and thought that this maybe could be a surprise. It wasn't. It is what I thought it was going to be. And I let it off the hook by giving it a chance. I have no idea how it has that high of a score. I also don't know how so many big name actors got conned into joining this sequel. I don't even know how or why this movie exists in the first place outside the fact that Sony Animation is stupid enough to think this will make just as much money as the first movie. I don't know what the final prognosis will be, but I hope it fails miserably because I don't want there to ever be an "Angry Birds 3." Because this movie annoyed me even more than the first, I'm giving it a 4/10.