Sing 2 is sufferable only in comparison to the last tuneless round of cartoon karaoke
There’s nothing true in Garth Jennings’ animated ode to artistic purity
Film Reviews Sing
To whatever extent Hollywood is one big arms race to build the best, most lucrative mousetrap, the money machine that is the fledgling Sing franchise demands some respect. There’s a cold corporate brilliance to the idea of fitting such ratings juggernauts as American Idol and The Voice to the mold of a kiddie time-killer. Writers can whip up inspiring backstories for the animal contestants from scratch instead of editing together reality, and the studio parentage of animation house Illumination gives them free rein to raid the colossal Universal Music Group catalogue. That level of access blows open the door to the musical equivalent of a cinematic universe more cohesive than most IP mash-ups, with an unyielding soundtrack that corrals Elton John, Eminem, Whitney Houston, and Billie Eilish into one bouncy playlist. (Only a select handful of songs, including “Girl On Fire” by Alicia Keys and a remix of Cardi B’s “I Like It,” have been licensed from competing conglomerates.)
The buoyant let’s-put-on-a-show enthusiasm coursing through Garth Jennings’ sequel to his 2016 blockbuster Sing takes some of the cynical edge off a film that often seems like it began as a boardroom presentation. But if the acoustics sound off, that’s because his jukebox musical is still hollow inside. The ensemble’s individual plot threads all lead to the same pat life lesson about being being true to and/or believing in yourself. In between the many high-gloss production numbers and a couple commendable bits of physical comedy putting the previous installment to shame, there’s a lot of treacle delivered with minimal conviction. Our menagerie of belters zip from one juncture of their arcs to the next as if on a conveyor belt. They only seem earnest when there’s a microphone in their respective hands, paws, or claws.
In the first film, koala impresario Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) threw together a singing contest to save his struggling theater. The follow-up raises the stakes by sending him and his stable of furry, scaly talent to the big time. In the Vegas-ish showbiz hub of Redshore City, they sneak into an audition with lupine kingmaker Jimmy Crystal (Bobby Cannavale, his sandpaper voice well-suited to the role), cueing up another one of the rapid-fire tryout sequences that also allowed the first film to burn through song cues and sight gags. This time around, fewer bits aim for hipness and trigger a reflexive full-body wince, though the dabbing elephant is difficult to move past.
Moon and his merry band book the gig, but only by promising the comeback of Clay Calloway (Bono), the reclusive lion rock star who hasn’t been seen since losing his wife 15 years earlier. Convincing him to emerge from his depressive retirement keeps Buster occupied while his one-dimensional stars split up for trite little conflicts of their own. Street-smart ape Johnny (Taron Egerton) can’t get the hang of ballet, and finds his footing with the help of a breakdancing lynx (Letitia Wright). Pig chanteuse Rosita (Reese Witherspoon) must conquer her fear of heights before she’s upstaged by Crystal’s bratty daughter (Halsey). Timid elephant Meena (Tori Kelly) has to play a love scene opposite narcissistic yak Darius (Eric André) while pining for crush Alfonso (Pharrell Williams), the ice cream vendor who calls her “goddess.” All three sub-stories converge on the useless moral that it is good to be confident.
Sing 2 benefits from the subterranean bar set by its predecessor, but it’s damningly faint praise to note that the net total of unpleasantness has somewhat decreased, mostly in that we’re no longer subjected to Seth MacFarlane’s Sinatra-voiced mouse. The requisite nattering cutesy critters inescapable in a post-Minions movie landscape—the first film’s helium-voiced J-pop red pandas known as the Q-Teez—have been mercifully set aside. Adults may find some moderate amusement in hearing Chelsea Peretti say, “Officers, arrest that wolf!” Though that could be tempered by the sad whiff of self-aggrandizement in Bono voicing a character treated like the greatest musical mind of all time, a reputation the character earned by writing the songs of U2.
Calloway’s scenes draw the most attention to the disharmony between the film’s stated emphasis on creative integrity and its barely concealed imperative to generate profit. The computer-assisted vocal tracks have been buffed to a streakless perfectionist sheen without any spirit or spontaneity to make the songs come alive, a falseness part and parcel with the overall inauthenticity about artistic purity. In this animalian world, there’s nothing more sacred than music. If only Jennings’ off-key karaoke party had that same reverence for its selections, or a fraction of the soul that was required to make them.
70 Comments
Your children getting older can be bittersweet, but the ‘sweet’ part comes when your kid ages out of this type of movie between the original and the sequel.
Heh, this is a peril of the youth entertainment franchise, isn’t it? Thinking of how I saw the first two TMNT movies in the theaters and wouldn’t have gone to the third one at gunpoint. That’s kids’ crap!
That’s why I didn’t have to go see Toy Story 4.
Pixar’s different, I’ll watch them in my 80s
Well you missed out, that was a good one.
My 8yo just saw the trailer 3 minutes ago. I could suffer the first one the numerous times he watched it, but this one looks dismal.
SING is just the Muppets but with unfunny characters with more emotional baggage.
I just found the gorilla and the koala to be annoying/unappealing characters, and there they are front and center, so the movie and the audience suffer.
If I’m going to watch a gorilla having emotional issues, it’s going to be the one in Aggretsuko.
Great shout, such a fun show and that voice actress for the gorilla…I mean I don’t even need subtitles for her.
The characters in Sing are also supposed to be good at what they do. The Muppets are so great because they are all objectively terrible at what they do, with the possible exception of the Electric Mayhem, but have confidence and enthusiasm in spades.
Kermit is a hell of a Banjo player.
I have rarely hated a trailer as much as I hate the trailer for “Sing 2.”
I was watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on NBC a couple of weeks ago and it felt like every other commercial was for this movie.
Thats bc they were.
I have not even heard the pig’s voice and its mere design inspires a cold, furious loathing. Bland and smooth meat, the very picture of a hormone-pumped swine. A butcher, when presented with such a pig, would only have to scoop away the bloodless cuts with a spoon. And the music producer would laugh at the incompetence of wasting the squeal — that’s what auto-tune is for.
why do his nostrils terminate a quarter-inch in?? How does he breathe??
Ah ha ha, you believe this pig to be carbon-based, requiring oxygen to animate itself, to feel, to live. This is a silicon organism, essentially a breast implant with a noise orifice.
“Everything but the squeal” now describes which parts of the animal are synthetic.
And don’t even get me started on his anus!
Man, if I had a dollar for every time someone said that to me…
The real question is how does he smell?
I was surprised not to find in the review that James Corden was the voice for that one.
Brutal.
Star for you.
Are you talking about the 3-minute one that basically is the entire movie? I remember watching that shit and thinking “This is hitting the plot points for every character.”
I’m sure this will make a bunch of money because of people who will watch literally any movie with talking, singing animals, no matter how terrible it is.
Well people with kids. If you are a grown adult and you went to see this and you don’t have kids and you think it sucks then grow up.
Those people are called “children”.
Those people are called “children”.
Those people are called “children”.
Yeah and d-bags like yourself will watch any movie where men dress in spandex going around saving the world.
I actually liked the first Sing movie. Not a great movie, but I found it reasonably pleasant for a “family” movie, with a mostly decent pace and at least some nice moments of humor and song. The critics’ consensus at Rotten Tomatoes says, by way of apparent praise, that is “undemanding”, and I agree with that being a fair assessment.
Bono playing a cartoon character seems a little too on the nose.His character, by dint of voice and attempted name, seems to be that of an African American styled artist and yet….
Presumably Lenny Kravitz gave the role a hard pass.
Uh what? Clay is as white a name as it comes. What are you smoking?
Universal Pictures and Universal Music Group have not had the same ownership for almost two decades. (The music people have a license to use the Universal logo.)
Regardless, the soundtracks for both films do have a UMG label…
don’t really feel one way or another about these movies, but i think it’s wild that kids are gonna grow up with so many old songs as ‘their’ songs from when they were kids, if that word salad makes sense.
Bad enough Glee already did that for a few years’ worth of youngsters ten years ago
In a world where it is 20-goddamn-21 and a giant docupic about the Beatles just came out, that seems like it should be less surprising.
This is what I can’t figure out. The songs are almost exclusively pre-2000’s. Do the kids these movies are aimed at give a shit about this music? Or are they simply amused because an animated gorilla is doing Elton John covers?
Going out on a limb….The songs are for the parents. Kids don’t really have music, and they never really have. Nsync and Brittney certainly weren’t aimed at 7 and 8 year old kids who are now 30, but play Hit me Baby one more time and everyone in that age group know it.
I don’t think most kids under 10 care what era songs are from. Kids tend to love catchy oldies like 60s pop and 80s new wave. I don’t think they become hyper-aware of what’s current, cool and fashionable (and exclude old stuff for being “uncool”) until they hit the early teens.
Also current teens seem to be into Queen, just generationally, and get pretty excited when they find some 80s band their contemporaries haven’t heard of.
It’s there to attract adults. Same with the voice cast. Kids don’t know what a Bono is, but mom and dad do.
well that’s my whole point! they’re gonna get into these songs under this bizarre context and be earwormed forever. they might not even know what it is until they hear it at a wedding 15 years later.i guess when i was a kid kids movies had their own original songs, even if they enlisted an elton john or a phil collins or a billy joel.
I’m actually impressed Seth MacFarlane managed to escape the sequel, especially considering that huge contract he signed with Universal, figured they would have made him do it.John C Reilly escaped, too, but mostly because his character was deeply inessential.
Speaking of the End Times, where is The Emoji Movie 2?
Hopefully in someone’s brain, where it shall never leave.
T.J. Miller is currently on a street corner pitching it.
Kept in a sealed vault, in a high-security facility that is rigged to detonate if anyone breaches more than one layer of security.
inspiring backstories for the animal contestantsI’m 100% sure Fox has teams of mad genetic scientists toiling in CRISPR labs on various islands of Moreau as we speak.
I dated someone who insisted I would love the first SING. That relationship did not last long.
That’s certainly a hill to die on.
Our menagerie of belters zip from one juncture of their arcs to the nextI’d see this if they were Belters, beratna.
This gets a sequel and Zootopia doesn’t.The universe is a dick like that.
I have been told by multiple people, and at least one article that Sing 1 was one of the worst animated movies ever. And this one is worse?
All kidding aside, this does look like the fucking worst.
I wish they’d called this one ‘Sing, Damnit!’
Hey, speaking as someone who in no way cares for Mr. McFarlane’s work, I would argue that Sinatra rat was the highlight of the first film.
Good lord. I can’t even fathom the amount of piss that fell in the reviewer’s and commenters’ Wheaties this morning to spew this much hatred for a movie that is designed for kids roughly 4-8 years old. You’re looking for character development in a movie built from the ground up for kids who still sleep in pull-ups? Jeebus, kids’ movies are never going to be “high art”. They’re nothing more than a sub-2 hour distraction for children. I respect your opinion, but the movie wasn’t made for you. Stop approaching it that way. The review should be written from the point of view of, “Will this entertain small children and keep their attention long enough to give Mom and Dad a brief respite from parenting?” If the answer is yes, then the movie is a win. Obviously I haven’t seen Sing 2 as it has not been released yet, but I’ll let my kids be the ultimate reviewers. They’ve loved movies that I couldn’t stand. I would pay cash money for a doctor to remove the parts of my brain that remember some of the horrible movies my kids have loved, but those movies weren’t made for me. Those movies made my kids happy for a few hours and that is money well spent in my mind. Bunch of Debbie Downers in here…
I dunno…I think we really need to understand the backstory and motivation for the singing Elephant to enjoy this one. And there’s nothing that toddlers and small children enjoy more in a movie than complex storylines and having to ponder deep philosophical and social issues.
I dunno…we really need to understand the backstory and motivation of the singing elephant. And what toddlers and small children really enjoy in movies complex storylines and thinking deeply about social and philosophical issues.
I dunno…we really need to
understand the backstory and motivation of the singing elephant. And what toddlers and small children really enjoy in movies complex storylines and thinking deeply about social and
philosophical issues.
AVClub
You’re the Debbie Downer – wouldn’t you be so much happier if your kids were obsessed with a good movie that you’ll at least somewhat enjoy having in the background and maybe even watching yourself? It’s completely possible to have entertainment mostly targeted at kids that adults can enjoy too.Illumination spent 75 million making the first movie and the same amount marketing it. Of course it’s a product precision designed to be your kids new obsession with associated merchandise. If you want to know if your kid will like this movie, then just listen to your kid. If you want to know what someone thinks about this as a movie compared other movies in general, come here.
Well said… 👍
Buncha adult pansies that never got to enjoy their childhood so they try to bull kids and others that do enjoy these movies. My 3 year old absolutely loves “Still haven’t found” all because of this movie. People that are this unhappy, truly should off themselves. No one wants to deal with their negativity.
I’m glad you said that. I watched it with my 6 yr old daughter yesterday and we thought it was great fun. We also love the 1st Sing. It’s essentially a broadway show but with ideas that could never be done in the real world. I don’t get all the hate. For the record, my kid is a mad Studio Ghibli fan too so it’s not like she just consumes pabulum. She knows what she likes and she likked Sing 2 you misanthropes!
The singing pig is cute and all, but where is the truth?!