There is no other way to put this: The LEGO Movie 2 is the Scream 2 of brick-based animation sequels. There is more of the same, bigger, louder, brighter... but lesser, too.
It is far from a bad movie, and at times there are flashes of the painfully funny original, but mostly this is a sequel which over-delivers on re-delivering what came before. The obvious problem being that the lightning-in-a-bottle originality just isn't going to be as good the second time around.
Since the original was released in 2014 to huge critical and commercial success and even an Oscar nomination (for Best Original Song, but inexplicably not for Best Animated Movie), the series has suffered from diminishing returns.
The LEGO Batman Movie was followed by The LEGO Ninjago Movie, each making less and less money, receiving lower and lower Rotten Tomatoes scores, and now the sequel to the original is here, with directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller returning only as producers and writers, and directing handed over to Mike Mitchell.
Mitchell himself has a bit of a chequered CV, starting his career with Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, before moving on to the worst Shrek movie (Shrek Forever After), as well as Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, a film that never got any better than the pun in it's title. And then there was Trolls, a movie you only remember because of that Justin Timberlake song.
That behind-the-scenes changing-of-the-guard is never felt more profoundly than during the opening scenes, when we hit the ground running, picking up the story directly from that cliffhanger ending: Alien-like creatures (in actuality, LEGO DUPLO blocks) arrive and promptly lay waste to the world the entire first movie spent building.
Five years later, we're in a Mad Max Fury Road-esque post-apocalypse, and during another apparently random invasion, Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett), Unikitty (Alison Brie), Metalbeard (Nick Offerman), and Benny The Astronaut (Charlie Day) are kidnapped by an intergalactic bounty hunter named General Mayhem (Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Stephanie Beatriz) on behalf of Queen Watvera Wa'Nabi (Tiffany Haddish) for some severely over-complicated reasons.
So it is up to Emmet (Chris Pratt) to follow them across space and time and basements to save them, teaming up with Rex Dangervest (also Chris Pratt) along the way, a raptor-training, space-archaeologist who loves adventure.
All of this happens in about ten minutes flat, zipping along at a pace so quickly that it might as well be a visual and emotional blur, while it is also attempting to plant the seeds of the Movie's Big Message (which seems to be both "don't change yourself for other people", but also "change yourself enough to let more people into your life"), and ALSO trying to land jokes.
It is too much, way too much for Mitchell to apparently handle, and the film is particularly clunky when attempting to change gears from being funny, which stops the plot dead, or telling the story, at which point the movie stops being funny.
If this all sounds too harsh, then we should say that the movie is still kind of funny, and at times properly laugh out funny, but compared to the seamless hilarity that the original consistently delivered while also telling a profoundly smart and meta story, it just doesn't stack up.
The "villain" isn't as interesting as Will Ferrell's Lord Business (who appears for about 30 seconds of the sequel), none of the new supporting characters can compare to Liam Neeson's schizophrenic crooked cop (who appears in one scene here, and has no lines), with only a particularly clumsy Banana-Man (Parks & Rec's Ben Schwartz) lodging in the memory afterwards.
Everything is good, but after being treated to Everything Is Awesome, good feels like a let-down.
There is one point during the movie when a celebrity provides the voice for their own LEGO character, and it is such a brilliantly funny, self-referential moment, that it will probably go down as one of the funniest moments of the year.
It is just too bad the rest of the movie has such a tough time matching it.
The Lego Movie 2 is released in Irish cinemas from Friday 8 February.
Clip via Warner Bros. Pictures
