The Secret Life of Pets 2

2016's The Secret Life of Pets was not a great movie, but it had enough heart, laughs and likable characters to make it worth watching.  In comparison, the just-released sequel feels like a workmanlike effort that plops the likable characters into contrived and forced multiple plots, and foregoes what made the original a success.  There are laughs to be had, and a couple breathtaking sequences, but it never adds up to a lot.

Watching The Secret Life of Pets 2, you get the sense that the filmmakers were not sure which direction to take the movie, or the returning characters.  The movie features multiple plots, perhaps too many for a movie that barely runs 85 minutes.  The first movie had kind of a multi-plot structure also, but it knew how to tie it all together.  Here, the large cast of animals seem to be existing in their own stories, and the movie keeps on jumping haphazardly from one plot to the next, with little care or concern on bringing them all together.  What made the first film work was that it created a community with all the various pets who lived within a Manhattan apartment building.  They visited with each other, they hung out with each other, and they all had a part to play in the overall narrative.  Here, the pets are mostly given their own separate storyline, forced to act on their own for the most part, and it's just not as fun.

Just as before, our lead pet is a Jack Russell Terrier named Max (voice by Patton Oswalt), who lives with his canine "brother" Duke (Eric Stonestreet) and human owner Katie (Ellie Kemper).  Since the last time we saw them, Katie has since married a man named Chuck (Pete Holmes), and given birth to a young son, whom Max has become overly protective of to the point of being neurotic.  The whole group takes a weekend trip to Chuck's family farm, where Max meets a steely farm dog named Rooster (Harrison Ford, at his crankiest), who teaches Max that it's okay to let kids get hurt once in a while, since it's how they learn, and to face many of his own fears.  The relationship between Max and Rooster plays out kind of the same way as the one Billy Crystal and Jack Palance had in 1991's City Slickers, and I liked how the two played off of each other.  Unfortunately, the movie never has the time to focus on it as it should, as it's too busy juggling a variety of other unrelated plots that keep on cutting in to the stuff that works.

The most obtrusive plot concerns the bunny Snowball (Kevin Hart), who fancies himself a superhero now, and is hired by another dog named Daisy (Tiffany Haddish) to rescue a white tiger cub from a cruel Russian circus owner (Nick Kroll, speaking with an accent that sounds about as authentic as Boris and Natasha from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons).  This is a plot that goes nowhere, and only exists to add some generic villains to the mix that are unnecessary.  Sadly, it's also the story that gets the most attention.  It's supposed to be the plot that brings all the characters together, as everyone joins in to rescue the tiger from a runaway circus train in an action climax that is as creatively bankrupt as it is boring.  All it does is prove that this movie never needed an action plot centered on a kidnapping villain in the first place.

The final plot the film throws at us is the one that gets the most laughs, because it centers on the two most memorable characters from the first film.  Gidget the dog (a scene-stealing Jenny Slate) loses one of Max's favorite toys, and to get it back, she must venture into a crazy cat lady's apartment that is crawling with ferocious felines.  She must disguise herself as a cat, and in order to do so, she seeks advice from the deadpan cat Chloe (Lake Bell), who teaches her the ways of cat nip, knocking stuff off of tables, and walking on the computer keys when the human owner is using it.  This whole segment would probably be great as a half hour TV special with these characters, but buried within the confines of this narrative, it never really finds a proper place.  It's very funny, with both Slate and Bell having some great one-liners, but because it has nothing to do with the overall movie, it can't help but feel like a distraction.

Because it never finds a way to connect these wildly different plots, save for bringing everyone into a chase scene for the end, The Secret Life of Pets 2 feels wildly unfocused.  It keeps on touching on subjects like letting go and letting a child make their own mistakes, or the value of friendship, but it never really has time to focus on anything, because the movie is too busy trying to juggle its multiple angles, and never finding a connection.  It often feels like we're watching three failed pilot episodes for a TV series based on the first movie that have been spliced and edited together to make a feature.  And because the movie lacks focus, we just don't get to be behind these characters like we were the last time.  The heart and emotion that brought all these characters together is completely absent.  It doesn't feel like they exist in one big world.  Due to the largely fragmented nature this film takes, I just could not get involved.

Not that it will matter to little kids, who will no doubt thrill at seeing their favorite characters from before on the big screen again.  But fans who are over 10 will probably feel like this is diminished returns.  It's not bad in any way, it just can't settle on a proper tone or angle, and so it feels uneven and lacks focus.  There's stuff that does work here, but the filmmakers never figured out how to bring it all together.

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