Despicable Me 2 / Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 2

Some more double reviewing needing here, this time in the form of animated sequels to films that made a nice return at the box office a few years back. The difference being that whilst Despicable Me racked up a huge profit it was years behind Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs in terms of plot, jokes and overall enjoyment. However, the law of follow-ups is still accurately adhered to as both films are well below the quality level of the original production and for Despicable Me 2 that’s bad news indeed. Frankly I’m not sure I actually even need to do a review of this film and will basically do a bit of plagiarising (from my review of the original film) where I wrote “Kids will enjoy this more than adults, as the emphasis is on slapstick as opposed to anything more cutting edge or satirical”. That more than applies here, but things are even more puerile then before as fart gags begin to take centre stage. With the trailer already giving away the few funny jokes there are, adults will find this a serious chore to sit through. However, if you’ve got kids, thanks to Universal Pictures cynical / understandable marketing of those lovable minions, you’ll be dragged to this anyway. Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs was one of the sleeper hits of 2009 and one of those films you saw at the cinema and immediately felt like you were part of a special club that only had (in relative terms of cinema-goers) a few other members. It hardly warranted a sequel mind, but hey, here we are. This time round Flint Lockwood and the rest of the inhabitants of Swallow Falls have been relocated whilst a clean-up job occurs on their island. However the FLDSMDFR (unless you’ve seen the first film that will make little sense to you, but it’s still one of the best repeatable gags for many a year) bursts back into life, but this time starts producing food / animal hybrids (foodimals!) which appear to have a taste for humans. The problem the film has is that the brains behind the original (writer-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller) have moved to executive producer positions this time, but from the final output on show it appears their input has been fairly minimal. Despite the silly premise of the original film it also had a slant towards the more mature side of the audience, but this mixture of pleasing both sections of the crowd has gone here as we’ve gone into mainly child pleasing territory (though ironically, I would think some of the more nasty looking foodimals on show would give some tiny tots a few nightmares). Clearly the production team have had great fun dreaming up the foodimals (tacodile, anyone?), but apart from that, there’s very little originality on show. There’s the basic plot line of not letting your family and friends down and the new villain of the piece looks like he was thought up during a lunch hour. Though any film that can get a laugh out of a “There’s a leek in the boat” gag can’t be all bad. On a side issue, prior to the film’s release Sony Pictures teamed up with a number of companies to help send a huge amount of food to families in need. Obviously the theme of the film was partly a driver for this, but it rightly puts other animated films marketing approaches (i.e. cuddly toys et al) into their shameful place. Despicable Rating: 3/10. Meatballs Rating: 5/10.