Warmed-Up But Not Quite as Good: A Review of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

I wrote a review of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs when it came out here in January 2010, four months after its release in the United States, on my now-defunct Multiply page. I felt it was fun, visually exciting, but ultimately disposable. I have enjoyed re-watching it on DVD with my kids since then, and as a result we were all looking forward to watching the sequel. We were willing to forgo watching it in 3-D to save some money, but unfortunately it was the only available format where we watched it.

The story of the sequel picks up from where the first film left off, although it retroactively negated the after-credits sequence of the first film which suggested events that followed the destruction of Swallow Falls. This film immediately begins in the aftermath of the destruction of the town, which was caused by a food hurricane generated by a machine invented by Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) which turns water into food.

Here, Flint, his weather-reporter girlfriend Sam (Anna Faris), his dad (James Caan) and various friends are relocated from their island by a think tank known as Live Corp., run by Flint's childhood hero, super-inventor Chester V (Will Forte). Chester hires Flint to work at Live Corp., where Flint has the time of his life, not realizing that the real plan of Chester and his assistant, a talking orangutan named Barb (Kristen Schaal) is to recover his food generating machine, the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator (FLDSMDFR) while Flint is distracted. When Chester's extraction teams disappear during their attempts to find the machine, Chester decides to send the expendable Flint over to the island and find his machine. Flint brings along his dad and his friends, and what they find is not at all what they expected.

I love cartoons, whether they are hand-drawn, stop motion or computer-generated. I love their sense of whimsy, and how they basically make me feel like a kid again, especially the silly ones.

The first film had the benefit of being based on a kids' book that my children and I enjoyed, as well as the novelty of giant food falling from the sky. This novelty was always going to wear off, but to the filmmakers' credit they've expanded on an idea that was briefly explored in the first film (e.g. the flying pizzas, fighting chickens and killer gummi bears) and have introduced an entire ecosystem of creatures made of food, including a giant cheeseburger spider, shrimpanzees, tacodiles, and a whole host of outrageous looking concoctions that have come to life. Considering that so many animals are made into food it was visually engaging to see that turned around this movie. Also, as a 3-D experience this film was pretty striking. Chester V's nose poked at us every time he looked into the screen.

In terms of writing, though, the film left quite a bit to be desired. The first film was hardly a masterclass in scripting, but the second film, with its thoroughly forgettable villain who vaguely feels like a cheap shot at the late Steve Jobs (though probably more because of how he looks than anything else) and a hero who seems every bit the idiot he was in the first film, really skimps on the story and characterization here. The writing feels like it developed just enough to justify the various visual gags that punctuate the humor, and that's about it.

It was still a lot of fun for the kids, but the adults should prepare to be patient while sitting through this.

3/5