The Angry Birds Movie 2 (2019) - Movie Review

This is going to be a difficult film to write about. Not because it’s the latest cinematic addition to a franchise that really shouldn’t exist, given the highly disposable nature of its source video game series. Not because it’s a follow-up to a film that I gave a fair amount of slack to while everyone else was gawking at the utter memeage of its soundtrack (Limp Bizkit’s Behind Blue Eyes is one of those songs that shouldn’t be in any movie). Not even because of my recurring issue with family films about talking animals. Rather, it’s because this film defies any semblance of a ‘good or bad’ binary, as it sits snugly in both at the exact same time. Read on and I’ll try and explain.

I don’t how they managed it but we somehow have an even weirder soundtrack this time around. It’s not entirely that the picks are outright bad, but they are insanely tacky throughout. Axel F as background to an inexplicable dance battle, The Final Countdown set to a literal countdown for the big villain’s evil plan, Space Oddity for when three hatchlings end up in space because of reasons, Baby Shark doo-doo do-do do-doo?! I am frankly stunned at how cheesy this all is, even considering the sub-legend of its predecessor. And yet, no matter how bizarre the licensed music picks got, they all somehow got a very guilty grin from me.

Not that the sense of free-form idiocy is restricted to the soundscape; the entire film is pants-on-head stupid. Peter Ackerman, Eyal Podell and Jonathon E. Stewart’s respective scripting consistently makes for eyeroll material, from the jokes (which admittedly are better than before, starting with the appearance of Squeal Team Six) to the character actions to the fact that this is a plot hinged on being left at the altar (following a high-school romance montage set to the theme of Dawson’s Creek, in case the soundtrack isn’t obvious enough).

It’s all so blatantly, incessantly, undeniably silly, but credit where it’s due in that the film owns every second of it, meaning that it’s the kind of self-aware stupid where it isn’t expecting to get anything past the audience. It knows how asinine this all is, adding to the comedy value without directly insulting anyone else’s intelligence.

Part of that success is down to the performances, which both the newcomers and returning voices working nicely with their respective archetypes, but primarily, it’s down to the aesthetic Sony Pictures Animation and directors Thurop Van Orman and John Rice create for the story. Right from its opening set piece involving a ‘prank war’ between the island of birds and the island of pigs, it establishes a classically cartoonish tone, one that operates purely on Looney Tunes logic, actively shaking pig butts at any semblance of reality.

From inflatable bird babies to the acquisition of snake-skin clothing, to the owner of said snake-skin wanting it back, it keeps hitting all this incredibly strange notes that, for as goofy as it continues being, still manages to elicit a lot of chuckles in the process.

It may have certain pretences about how looking out only for one’s self can end up putting others in harm’s way, along with the ego complex that can arise once people start relying on you as a hero in the case of Jason Sudeikis’ Red, but that just ends up being sensible garnish on a twenty-story-high sundae where you can’t tell if it’s dressed with lime syrup or pig snot.

Where the first film had me playing devil’s advocate for parts of it, no such conflict exists here. It will likely go down as one of the dumbest, if not the dumbest, film I’ll see all year, and I had an absolute blast watching it. This is the best kind of dumb fun.