Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2

2009's Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs wasn't my favorite animated film from that year, but it had some undeniable charms, a strong voice cast, and a few rare moments of true emotion and tenderness.  The sequel, just released in theaters, pretty much tosses out what worked the first time, save for the cast.  Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 is as unnecessary and as relentless a sequel as we're likely to see in 2013.  It's loud, it's pointless, and it's just not that funny.

Picking up mere moments after the original ended, we rejoin eccentric yet likable scientist Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader), his new girlfriend Sam Sparks (Anna Faris), and their offbeat friends as they are forced to leave their island home after Flint's food-making machine went out of control, and dropped giant portions of food on their home, turning their town of Swallow Falls into a wreck.  They are all relocated to San Franjose, California, while a clean up crew repairs the damage to their homes.  In their new location, they are all given new jobs.  Flint, in particular, is given a dream position working for his childhood hero, a scientist who used to host a kid's show named Chester V (Will Forte), and now heads a huge planet-friendly mega corporation called Live Corp.

It turns out that Chester is in charge of the clean up operation back at Swallow Falls, and that he has nefarious plans for Flint's food-making device when he eventually tracks down the remains of it.  However, finding it will be harder than it sounds, as it seems that the massive quantities of food left behind have somehow mutated into animal/food hybrids.  With the eco system on the island changing, and Chester's goons unable to track down the device, Chester decides to send Flint and his friends on a secret mission where they must return to the island and destroy the food making machine once and for all, before the food/animal mutants find a way off the island, and wreak havoc on the world.  But are the creatures all bad?  Sam is the first to notice that the creatures may not be harmful when she befriends a little strawberry creature.  The longer Flint and his friends stay on the island, the more they begin to realize that the creatures are not really dangerous, and the man they're working for may not have the most noble of intentions.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 is bright and colorful, and has the same likable characters from before, but it plugs them into a generic plot where they're constantly facing danger, instead of interacting with each other.  Even though I wasn't a big supporter of the original, I still found the moments where Flint tried to connect with his emotionally distant father (James Caan) , and win the heart of the sweet Sam Sparks kind of touching.  We get none of that here, as the characters, while still likable, just aren't that interesting this time around.  This is most likely due to the fact that this latest film has different directors and writers behind it.  Instead of focusing on the emotions of these characters, they over-emphasize the bad food-related puns, and mindless action sequences that were tiresome in the last movie, and come across as uninspired here.

It's obvious the only reason this movie exists is because the first one was a surprise hit at the box office.  But that doesn't mean that so little effort had to be put into it.  Aside from some striking visuals (some of the food/animal hybrids, such as a cheeseburger spider with sesame seed eyes and french fry legs, are clever) and the returning voice cast, this is a largely generic enterprise.  The jokes are basically non-stop food-related puns, which really little kids may enjoy.  The one time I did laugh was at a sight gag involving a fellow inventor's latest creation - the "Awwh-tomobile", which is a car that runs on a cute little kitten being stuck in the gas tank.  Maybe the movie needed more absurd moments like that one.  The rest of the jokes seemed kind of predictable in comparison.

With no other family films out there at the moment, I'm sure the movie will make money.  All I can do is comment that 2013 is reaching its end in a few short months, and we still haven't had a great animated film.  Our next best bet is the Fall offering from the Disney Studio, Frozen, which hopefully will show more imagination than this film did.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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