The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part

"Building a pile of multi-coloured CGI bricks into one of the great all-ages comedies of recent years, The Lego Movie was the toy-to-film adaptation that could. While other product-based premises floundered with offering anything more than an overblown advertisement (see the pre-Bumblebee Transformers franchise, for example), The Lego Movie could turn its plastic construction playthings into a charming feature with its own flavour. As mainstream animation began to suffer from stylistic homogeneity, it could stand out visually. Embracing the rectangular objects at its centre in more than just a superficial, merchandise-slinging way, it could also smartly and savvily engage with Lego’s very purpose. Indeed, where all of the above points are concerned, it could and it did."

"After the creative, comedic and emotional highlights of 2014’s The LEGO Movie, this sequel had a lot to live up to. But even when factoring in the difficulty of lightning striking twice, The Second Part still comes as a colossal disappointment. Where its predecessor captured the joy of playing with LEGO and was filled with an overload of anarchic, irrepressible humour this sequel feels laboured in its worldbuilding and—damningly—barely elicited a couple of chuckles out of me."

"What amounts to a really entertaining feature-length commercial."

"Viewers reared on "The Lego Movie" will find plenty to nourish them anew."

"What distinguishes this from the better Lego movies is that they're good commercials."

"The second Lego Movie is even better than the original: a sophisticated new adventure that gives us a new look at how the universality of the Lego universe was more gendered than we thought."

"This is an animated adventure that demands your attention and doesn't let it go."

"Is Lego 2 as good as the original? Not really. Few things take the bloom off a creative concept like a sequel. But the movie has a knack for throwing pop-culture references at the screen with a wild abandon that's hard to resist."

""The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part" becomes an amusingly derivative space opera, where the hallways and stairwells of an American suburban home become portals to so much intergalactic mayhem."

"Proves every bit as repetitive and uninspired as its glib title, bringing little that's fresh or funny to the interlocking brick table despite boasting a script penned by originators Phil Lord and Christopher Miller."