In the sequel, the bird named Red (Jason Sudeikis), once an outcast because he’s a jerk, is now a hero because he saved Bird Island last time. That there is a joke about him being beloved only because he proved useful (like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) is our first indication that the sequel has a different attitude. Red is still full of himself, even more so now that he’s a hero who spends his days defending Bird Island in the “prank war” against Pig Island. When the leader of the pigs, Leonard (Bill Hader), proposes a truce so that pigs and birds can fight a common enemy — the inexplicably frozen Eagle Island, run by a madwoman (madeagle) named Zeta (Leslie Jones) — Red is onboard, but only so he can prove his own heroism some more. This masks his real concern, which is a fear of being left out.<\/p>\n
And so a team is dispatched to Eagle Island to stop Zeta and deactivate her weaponized volcano. The team includes Red; his super-fast friend Chuck (Josh Gad); his potentially explosive friend Bomb (Danny McBride); Leonard the pig; Leonard’s headphone-wearing daughter, Courtney (Awkwafina); Garry the I.T. pig (Sterling K. Brown); and Chuck’s brainiac sister, Silver (Rachel Bloom), an engineering student who annoys Red. Mighty Eagle (Peter Dinklage), the washed-up predator who lives on Bird Island, is consulted for his insider knowledge of the eagles, but is cagey about his connection to these particular eagles.<\/p>\n
The high point of the Eagle Island mission is the effort by Chuck, Bomb, Leonard, Courtney, and Garry to infiltrate the top-secret headquarters by means of an eagle costume that the five of them share. The resulting slapstick (each pig or bird is operating a different part of the Trojan Eagle’s body) is some of the best animated tomfoolery I’ve seen in a while, culminating in a hysterical sequence at a row of urinals in a men’s (eagles’) room. (Real birds have cloacae, but the birds in these movies have penises.)<\/p>\n
This gets at the core of why the sequel works better than the original. Instead of trying to be a traditionally loony ‘toon focused on an unlikable protagonist, the sequel leans into Red’s shallowness and makes him an object of derision and pity, almost like a Seinfeld<\/em>\u00a0character. (The way an unrelated B-story involving three young birds caring for three not-yet-hatched eggs eventually ties in with the main narrative also shows Seinfeld<\/em>-ian elegance.) “Pathetic” is a lot more likable than “arrogant,” and seeing a depressed Red slumped on his living room floor cramming popcorn into his beak while pouring melted butter down his gullet goes a long way toward, well, humanizing him.<\/p>\n The other characters, too, while not loathsome, are given free rein to be shallow, absurd, and pop-culture-savvy in ways that Pixar characters seldom are. Director Thurop Van Orman (from TV’s Adventure Time<\/em> and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack<\/em>) and screenwriters Peter Ackerman (Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs<\/em>), Eyal Podell, and Jonathon E. Stewart (Smallfoot<\/em><\/a>) make liberal use of instantly recognizable pop songs to make comedic points (there’s a ’90s flashback with eagles dressed in contemporary fashions while Paula Cole’s Dawson’s Creek<\/em> song plays), and a few of the setup-punchline combos have the zip of classic Simpsons<\/em>. It seems the best way to make a movie out of a smartphone game is to ignore almost everything about the game and just have fun with the characters. Who knew? I’ll tell you what, the only thing a critic enjoys more than a good movie is a good movie that’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":12496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/crookedc-01.svg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nGrade: B+<\/span><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 36 min.; rated PG for rude humor and action<\/h5>\n
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