Two By Two: Overboard (2021) - Movie Review

In 2015, around when the big PureFlix boom of Christian films was taking place, I watched and reviewed a kids’ film called Two By Two (or Ooops! Noah Is Gone, or All Creatures Big And Small, depending on the market). Aside from being thoroughly annoying and containing one of the dumbest creature designs of any animated feature, it’s also a film I never expected to think about again after writing that review. But then posters for this sequel started turning up, and it seemed that my preordained path was to once again wade into the hideously-textured waters of family-friendly Bible shenanigans. And much like the first time round, this was not pleasant to sit through.

For a start, the plot is essentially the same as before, with Dave the Nestrian and Leah the Grymp searching for their missing children, after Dave accidentally jettisoned the last of their food supply (because ripping off Pixar movies is almost traditional for movies like this) and the kids along with it. There’s lip service made to the kids needing to learn adult responsibilities, but otherwise, it’s the usual collection of unnecessary dialogue that exists solely to fill out the run time. I’d be surprised that these filmmakers couldn’t come up with 90 minutes’ worth of material on their own, if I weren’t already aghast at what they thought would suffice in that regard.

Dave the Nestrian is still a colossal idiot, and not in any way endearing and/or entertaining to watch bumble through his scenes. Where this becomes a bigger problem is in the revelation of where his and Leah’s kids have ended up: An island where they find an entire colony of Nestrians. And they’re all as stupid as Dave is, up to and including them also having to learn that they could breathe underwater (apparently, Dave literally being too stupid to breathe is a hereditary thing). This only compounds how truly asinine the Nestrians themselves are as a species which (depending on one’s theological leanings) is either the result of an evolutionary fluke that rivals the platypus, or a god so cruel that he engineered an animal whose life expectancy, in any rational universe, would be in negative integers.

Yes, I have quite a few issues with these things, who rival the Boov from Dreamworks’ Home for raw annoyance value. As a result, all the quibbling between the characters about the Nestrian colony that isolated themselves from the outside world, the active volcano it sits on, and the approaching Ark full of ‘monsters’, land on deaf ears because it’s quite impossible to care about any of them. Either they die from burning lava or the predators eat them all; if anything else happens, it’s a sad ending far as I’m concerned. If that sounds callous, it’s only because I had to sit through watching these things make noise from their face holes. Oh, and sneeze glowing blue gas clouds when threatened, because again, they’re all evolutionary dead ends.

This is about as ‘successful’ as the first film, in that it contains average animation and voice acting that fails to engage through any means beyond a giant Nestrian statue with a ‘observational butt’ window. It’s stupid, and I get that a lot of that is by design, but it’s not even the fun kind of stupid. It’s also not even remotely necessary as a feature, as there’s nothing here that has any real reason to exist beyond the possibility for more Nestrian toy variants on our side of the screen. And even then, a 3D-printed Spore creation would be more appealing than having to look at any of these things again.