I wanted to like this movie more, because I liked the first Sing and thought it was Illumination's best effort to date. A lot of Illumination movies boil down to "here's a premise, some characters, and now watch a series of loosely connected events unfold with an overhelping of gags that may or may not be funny." Granted, the first Sing had a bit of that going on too, but it at least felt like it had a story to tell. Not a whole lot to tell, but at least story arcs like Johnny's seemed to resonate, and that's a pretty decent accomplishment considering one of the movie's main goals is to desperately sell Universal's music catalog to kids.
Sing 2 basically turned up the music and the spectacle and turned down the writing to the bare minimum of "there is a plot, maybe." None of the returning characters' arcs are as good as the first movie, even simple things like explaining why Ash is really into Calloway is never touched on so there are a lot of missed opportunities to add even a slight layer to characters. I did like most of the new characters. Porsha's vapid but fun. Darius and Alfonso are mostly non-starters; the movie is so overstuffed, they really don't get the opportunity to be anything but vaguely animal-shaped tropes. Jimmy Crystal exists in a weird space where the movie relentlessly vilifies him but he doesn't actually do anything villainous and is actually right most of the time. The attempted murder turn made ZERO sense from a character, plot, and setting standpoint and the movie would have been better without it. I have a feeling they threw it in there because they realized their "villain" was just a grumpy dude with a lot of flaws and the movie comes across as kind of mean-spirited if anyone is sympathetic toward the character after all the crap done to him by end.
Buster Moon is probably the worst part of it, though. He's still a liar and a con artist but in the first movie he had that whole plot about saving the theater and not letting his father's sacrifice go down the drain, so even though he was clearly handling everything in the worst way, he was sympathetic for it. In this movie he just wakes up one day and decides his theater isn't enough and goes to Vegas of all places to chase fame in the theater industry. Why? Because! Why did he feel the need to break into the scary wolf dude's building and lie his ass off about a stage play that he didn't even come up with himself? Buster's desperation made sense in the first movie, but here...? I guess he was always just a compulsive liar then, huh? Am I supposed to feel sympathetic toward Buster when Jimmy Crystal calls him out and makes him shit his pants for essentially defrauding the one person in not-Vegas willing to back his farfetched dream? Are we going to delve into why Buster is so conniving and how he turned his greatest ally into an enemy through no one else's fault but his own? Oh, we're going vilify Jimmy Crystal instead and ignore Buster's misdeeds and any character development that comes from a character grappling with their own flaws? Okay. You can do better than that, Sing 2.
I wanted to like this movie more, because I liked the first Sing and thought it was Illumination's best effort to date. A lot of Illumination movies boil down to "here's a premise, some characters, and now watch a series of loosely connected events unfold with an overhelping of gags that may or may not be funny." Granted, the first Sing had a bit of that going on too, but it at least felt like it had a story to tell. Not a whole lot to tell, but at least story arcs like Johnny's seemed to resonate, and that's a pretty decent accomplishment considering one of the movie's main goals is to desperately sell Universal's music catalog to kids.
Sing 2 basically turned up the music and the spectacle and turned down the writing to the bare minimum of "there is a plot, maybe." None of the returning characters' arcs are as good as the first movie, even simple things like explaining why Ash is really into Calloway is never touched on so there are a lot of missed opportunities to add even a slight layer to characters. I did like most of the new characters. Porsha's vapid but fun. Darius and Alfonso are mostly non-starters; the movie is so overstuffed, they really don't get the opportunity to be anything but vaguely animal-shaped tropes. Jimmy Crystal exists in a weird space where the movie relentlessly vilifies him but he doesn't actually do anything villainous and is actually right most of the time. The attempted murder turn made ZERO sense from a character, plot, and setting standpoint and the movie would have been better without it. I have a feeling they threw it in there because they realized their "villain" was just a grumpy dude with a lot of flaws and the movie comes across as kind of mean-spirited if anyone is sympathetic toward the character after all the crap done to him by end.
Buster Moon is probably the worst part of it, though. He's still a liar and a con artist but in the first movie he had that whole plot about saving the theater and not letting his father's sacrifice go down the drain, so even though he was clearly handling everything in the worst way, he was sympathetic for it. In this movie he just wakes up one day and decides his theater isn't enough and goes to Vegas of all places to chase fame in the theater industry. Why? Because! Why did he feel the need to break into the scary wolf dude's building and lie his ass off about a stage play that he didn't even come up with himself? Buster's desperation made sense in the first movie, but here...? I guess he was always just a compulsive liar then, huh? Am I supposed to feel sympathetic toward Buster when Jimmy Crystal calls him out and makes him shit his pants for essentially defrauding the one person in not-Vegas willing to back his farfetched dream? Are we going to delve into why Buster is so conniving and how he turned his greatest ally into an enemy through no one else's fault but his own? Oh, we're going vilify Jimmy Crystal instead and ignore Buster's misdeeds and any character development that comes from a character grappling with their own flaws? Okay. You can do better than that, Sing 2.