Also checked out the thoroughly unnecessary family animated comedy The Secret Life of Pets 2. Unnecessary because they barely tried, not because the movie shouldn’t exist. The first film was a low-key alright of a flick about what our pets do when we aren’t around (kind of a furry Toy Story). This movie follows the same premise… more or less.
So this film is really three barely connected short stories awkwardly glued into what’s supposed to be a full length movie. There’s one story about city dogs on vacation in the country (with a newborn they want to protect). One story is about a dog trying to rescue a squeaky toy from the apartment of a crazy cat lady. The final is about the movie’s deluded bunny rabbit who thinks he’s a superhero having to rescue a white tiger from an evil circus owner.
I mention each story primarily because the marketing behind this movie never mentioned a plot. It just had seemingly random vignettes… because that’s what this movie really is. There’s very little connective tissue between the stories and it almost feels like this could be three separate episodes of a failed tv series. The stories do connect in the end and the closer it gets to its own action/adventure dramatic finale, the less interesting – and indeed the more dull – it gets. It’s weird that, even though I criticize the structure, the film would have worked better just sticking to a vision of three independent shorts.
To be fair, some of these short stories have decent moments and a real conception of what our pets might think and how they act. But I don’t think there was enough of that in the flick. They often act in ways that don’t bolster the premise (and, to be fair, that’s a problem with the first flick too).
But largely this movie just bored me. I think the target market is very small children and not their suffering parents. I think the core idea of this film series is good… I just think their implementation of the idea is bad.
Score: 64