Patton Oswalt and Harrison Ford star in a sequel that's suitable for kids, but not very entertaining for adults.
If you’ve always wondered what your pets are up to when you’re not around, you’re in luck, because The Secret Life of Pets was a very funny movie about just that subject, and you can watch it any time you want. The Secret Life of Pets 2, on the other hand, is a mediocre retread of the original, with a few good gags but very little reason to exist, aside from temporarily distracting children and putting their parents to sleep.The adorable lapdog Max, voiced by Patton Oswalt [taking over from Louis C.K.], thinks his life is just about perfect. He and his dog roommate Duke [Eric Stonestreet] are as happy as could be with their owner Katie [Ellie Kemper], until she meets a nice guy and has a baby, Liam, which proceeds to make Max a nervous wreck. At first he’s afraid the baby will hurt him - which it often does - but then he develops an affection for Liam, and he becomes absolutely terrified that anything will hurt the child.
Max develops a full-blown anxiety disorder, and at first it doesn’t help that his owners have taken him to the country, to a farm full of angry animals and unpredictable dangers. There Max meets a courageous, macho dog named Rooster [Harrison Ford], who forces Max outside of his comfort zone and into a new, braver frame of mind.
That’s hardly enough plot to fill a half-hour animated episode, so The Secret Life of Pets 2 adds several other storylines about Max’s friends from the first movie. Gidget [Jenny Slate], a spoiled fluffy dog with a crush on Max, loses Max’s favorite toy in the apartment of a crazy cat lady. In order to get it out she’ll have to infiltrate the cat community, so she takes lessons in cat behavior from her neighbor Chloe [Lake Bell].
There’s also Snowball [Kevin Hart], the angry bunny from the original, who has settled into a life of domesticity with a little girl who dresses him in superhero costumes. Now he thinks he’s a real superhero, and he gets enlisted by a dog named Daisy [Tiffany Haddish] to help her rescue a white tiger from the circus.
The Secret Life of Pets 2 is very plucky and amiable, but it’s not much more than that. The storylines serve little purpose other than providing fast-moving, brightly colored diversions for young kids. They don’t speak to a child’s experience nor do most of them have anything to teach children, except for Max’s storyline. Even then, the moral that “you can overcome a mental illness just by manning up” might not be the message every parent wants to impart to their kids.
So it doesn’t have much to say. That would be fine if the movie was entertaining enough to get away with it. The original Secret Life of Pets made the most of an unexpected cast of characters, revealing unexpected fascinations and depths in each animal character. As a result it was genuinely funny, pretty much from beginning to end. The new film coasts on tired plots and characters we’ve already met going about their business. Gidget’s and Max’s storylines are straight out of a generic sitcom, and Snowball’s subplot is so danged ridiculous that it feels like it’s in the wrong movie.
The voice cast is stellar, however. Patton Oswalt makes Max his own, injecting an endearing, perpetual nervousness to a character who felt more like an everyman [everydog?] in the previous installment. Jenny Slate and Lake Bell are always delightful, and the whole sequence where Chloe teaches Gidget how to be a cat would make any cat owner howl with laughter. Kevin Hart seems to struggle with Snowball, never giving him a sympathetic moment, and always playing the superhero schtick to the nines, and Tiffany Haddish has very little to work with. Harrison Ford lends a likable brusque to the film, a no-nonsense attitude in a film full of nonsense. It’s the kind of character-based humor that made the original Secret Life of Pets so witty in the first place.
Kids will no doubt be satisfied with The Secret Life of Pets 2, because it’s light and adorably animated and full of silly jokes. It’s not a terrible film, it’s just not intelligent or entertaining enough to capture the attention of someone outside of the target demo, which has notoriously low standards.
Verdict
The Secret Life of Pets 2 is a fast-paced string of mostly mediocre jokes that younger audiences will enjoy, but aside from a few centerpieces, there's no much here to capture the attention if you're older than the intended audience.
Illumination’s “The Secret Life Of Pets” films do something the “Despicable Me” studio’s other offerings have yet to accomplish: They allow younger audiences to explore their feelings about new life experiences in a silly, lighthearted way through the travails of adorable animated animals. Despite being an overly loud and caustic clone of “Toy Story,” the first feature showed its target market that it’s perfectly okay to be frustrated about a new sibling joining the family. It gave kids and parents the fundamental tools to work through their difficulties, all with a healthy dose of slapstick.
Director Chris Renaud’s followup, “The Secret Life of Pets 2,” similarly spotlights the trepidation surrounding the arrival of a child. Only now, Renaud and returning screenwriter Brian Lynch deliver a lesson for the parents in the audience. Even though it poaches some themes and narrative structure from yet another Pixar classic [“Finding Nemo”], at least this time around the filmmakers demonstrate an essential understanding of the deeper elements that make that film work. This new installment stands as a celebration of pets’ endearing eccentricities, and a blessed respite from the live-action dog-centric weepies of late [“A Dog’s Journey,” “A Dog’s Way Home,” and the upcoming “The Art of Racing in the Rain”].
Loyal, lovable terrier Max [voiced by Patton Oswalt] thought his world was coming to an end when his owner Katie [Ellie Kemper] brought home big, shaggy mutt Duke [Eric Stonestreet]. However, he feels an even more dramatic shift in his sense of well-being after his owner marries and has her first child. Max’s worry over being a good protector to toddler Liam begins to manifest in bad habits and nervous tics like scratching at himself vigorously. He comes to see New York City, a glimmering beacon in a perpetual state of spring bloom, as an unrelenting obstacle course for hapless Liam, with mayhem and menace lurking under every grate and garbage can.
Sensing Max’s anxiety, Katie takes him to a behavior specialist, where the only help he gets for his psychological problems is a plastic cone. Humiliated by such a superficial solution, Max is stuck having to work through his lingering neuroses on a family trip to a sprawling farm outside the sparkling city. The change in atmosphere should lift his mood, but the pastoral paradise only terrifies him further, since he sees it as a battlefield full of frightening obstacles, like jagged cliffs and a terrorizing turkey. However, Max’s intimidating encounters with a grizzled, gruff, gravel-voiced herding dog, Rooster [Harrison Ford], lead him to uncover the courage to get over himself and his all-encompassing angst.
While Max’s main story unfolds away from home, Lynch’s screenplay invents two other threads to keep the other pets busy. Immediately before his trip, Max tasked puffy Pomeranian Gidget [Jenny Slate] to watch over his favorite squeaky toy, Busy Bee, which she immediately loses, of course. No sooner has Max left than the toy bounces all the way down the fire escape and into the dark, dank apartment of the building’s resident crazy cat lady. Now it’s up to gregarious Gidget, cantankerous cat Chloe [voiced by Lake Bell], pugnacious pug Mel [voiced by Bobby Moynihan], and determined dachshund Buddy [voiced by Hannibal Buress] to figure out a way to reclaim Max’s prized possession — a mission where most of the film’s comedic hijinks occur.
Expanding on one of the first film’s favorite characters, the sequel concocts an action-adventure storyline for Snowball [Kevin Hart], the insecure bunny who’s eager to prove that he’s not just some spoiled pet in satin pajamas. Reimagining himself as a kind of superhero, newly rechristened “Captain Snowball” agrees to help fearless Shih Tzu Daisy [Tiffany Haddish] on a rescue mission. Their treacherous journey to liberate a white tiger held against its will steers them directly into the sights of a sadistic circus owner [Nick Kroll].
When the three stories finally intersect, and the filmmakers connect all these disparate elements, the execution isn’t effortless. Designating Max to shoulder the emotion, Gidget to carry the comedy, and Snowball to propel the action segregates these tonal qualities rather than integrating them fluidly. Max’s storyline putters out once he leaves the farm, and when he reunites with his friends, his selfless actions and motivations feel repetitive of his own breakthrough moment that happened minutes prior. Also, Gidget and Snowball could have closed their own arcs in a more satisfying fashion.
That said, thematic resonance and character stakes are stronger here than in the previous feature. Though each of the film’s fragments show characters demonstrating bravery and facing challenges head-on [valuable lessons for kids to learn], it’s the representation of helicopter parenting that provides palpable pathos. Neurotic, overprotective child-rearing isn’t a revolutionary subject for films, animated or otherwise. Still, it’s unusual for a typical Illumination broad comedy to include a heartrending message that makes parents feel less alone in their very real, visceral struggles. It’s just cloaked in a shenanigans-soaked romp about what pets do when humans aren’t looking.