Angry Birds 2 (2019)
Directed by Thurop Van Orman
Written by Peter Ackerman
Starring Jason Sudeikis, Bill Hader
Release Date August 14th, 2019
Published August 14th, 2019
Angry Birds 2 is a significant improvement over the original. The first Angry Birds in 2016 was not terrible but it was plagued by the notion that it was a mercenary effort that was solely capitalizing on the hit app game. That was an accurate assessment but the creative team and the actors did make some of Angry Birds palatable with some solid jokes and a reasonably logical narrative.
Three years later the app game is pretty much a relic and the creative team behind Angry Birds 2 don’t have nearly as much of the burden of being mercenary or soulless. With distance from the game, we can focus on big jokes and these likable characters voiced by talented stars. It may still be a minor effort, but Angry Birds 2 justifies its own existence by garnering way more laughs than you expect.
Angry Birds 2 picks up the story of the Angry Birds and their rival green pigs as both islands continue to prank each other via their oversized slingshots. Red (Jason Sudeikis) is basking in the glory of having rescued Bird Island from the pig onslaught of the last movie. Unfortunately, even as his heroic self esteem grew, his insecurity has grown as well. Red has a deep seated fear that the current esteem in which he is held could go away at any moment and the thought is keeping him from enjoying all of the positive attention.
One night, after Red’s friends Bomb (Danny McBride) and Chuck (Josh Gad) drag him away from the beach where he stands watch daily, to go to a singles night for fun, a giant ice ball nearly hits the island. Another similar ice ball had just nearly crushed the pigs and their leader, King Leonard (Bill Hader) is having a fit. Leonard inadvertently triggers even more of Red’s insecurity by begging the Birds for a truce so that he can try to convince the Bird’s to team with the pigs to battle whatever is sending the ice balls. But all Red can think of is what he might lose if he isn’t defending Bird Island from the pigs.
The ice balls are coming from an icy island somewhere in between the Pigs and Birds. The ice island is populated by Eagles and their leader, Zeta, wants off the island in the worst way. She wants to use the ice balls to run off the Birds and Pigs so she can take their islands for herself, her daughter, Courtney (Awkwafina), and all of Eagle kind. Zeta also has a long history with Mighty Eagle (Peter Dinklage), the fake hero of bird island.
Will the pigs and birds be able to work together long enough to stop Zeta from destroying their islands or will her strange technology that captures lava inside of ice destroy both islands. If you think that is going to be a genuine question filled with any real tension then you are expecting too much of a silly, kids animated movie. The point isn’t plot in Angry Birds 2, it’s gags and the gags are, for the most part, quite funny.
The creators of Angry Birds 2, director Thurop Van Orman and writers Peter Ackerman and Eyall Podell, have packed Angry Birds 2 with a lot of good natured laughs and big comic set pieces and most of those work. They are not reinventing the genre or anything but they do enough to get consistent laughs out of a property that for all intents should not be as winning and enjoyable it is.
On top of the laughs, I became legitimately invested in Red’s identity crisis. No joke, Jason Sudeikis and the writers of Angry Birds 2 actually made me care about Red’s crisis, his deep insecurity. It is not something the movie lays on thick, but it is woven well into the story. Red doesn’t want to go back to being forgotten, bullied or looked down upon. The first film chronicled his unlikely hero status and Angry Birds 2 takes care to address how that story is playing out in the wake.
Of course movie sequels should pick up story threads from their predecessors but given the episodic nature of so many franchises would anyone have noticed that Angry Birds, of all things, had let a few story threads fall away? It’s almost brave that anyone thought we cared enough about the first film to remember the plot, to have the nerve to make the repercussions of that plot central to the main character’s story in Angry Birds 2 is an impressive bit of continuity.
As I said earlier, this isn’t rocket science and the makers of Angry Birds 2 are not reimagining the genre or anything. Instead, they’ve simply taken care to make a movie they can be proud of. It’s a movie that could have been given to many creative teams who might have slapped together some lowbrow, childish gags and market ready tie-ins for video games or toys and called it a day.
This team however, appeared to actually care about their work. They crafted this story. They took care in casting the voice cast, which also includes Angry Birds newcomers Rachel Bloom as Red’s love interest, This is Us superstar Sterling K Brown and Leslie Jones as a fantastically silly villain. The team behind Angry Birds 2 had every expectation that they would take the easy road to an easy paycheck and instead they made a genuinely funny and compelling sequel that surpasses the original.
