![]() ![]() So anyway, the film opens with a whirlwind montage in which timid Jack Russell terrier Max (Patton Oswalt, smoothly replacing the now-radioactive Louis C.K.) tells us all about how, shortly after he and his huge Newfie mix roommate Duke (Eric Stonestreet) learned to get along, their human owner Katie (Ellie Kemper) fell in love, got married, got pregnant, and had a son named Liam. No, these gags are all heightened, inexplicably so, pointing in the direction of three different genres and deciding that plugging adorable CG animals into those genres will generate comedy through incongruity, or some such damn thing. That conceit was used up by the 10-minute mark of the first movie. And not gags that address the secret life of pets, what they get up to when humans aren't around. It's basically just 86 minutes of watching loosely-connected pet-themed gags play out (the running time is much the best thing about the film). ![]() That would appear to have been too much effort for SLOP2, which contains three more or less autonomous plot strands, and forgets to put a conflict into two of them. And what do we generally get when filmmakers are obliged to effortfully crap out a follow-up to a story that didn't need one? A brazen re-tread, exaggerating the plot points of the original but not fundamentally altering them at all. This was always going to be a cash-in project, inspired more by the first film's jaw-dropping box office receipts (it was the most profitable release of 2016) than by Renaud's muse. Let us agree to set aside as an impossible fantasy of the airiest sort any chance that this was made because screenwriter Brian Lynch and director Chris Renaud passionately believed in the new story they'd devised to return us to this world. But it still deserved more than The Secret Life of Pets 2, which is really and truly one of the most uninspired sequels that I think I have ever seen. ![]() The point is that The Secret Life of Pets is not good. Considering that Illumination's top tier only just surpasses "affable mediocrity", its middle tier is getting us into some heinous places indeed.īut I have distracted myself. At best, it's a mid-tier film for Illumination, the animation studio best-known for those damn walking yellow Tic-Tacs with the prominent butt cheeks. I'm not going to go around calling 2016's The Secret Life of Pets a good movie, because it ain't. ![]()
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