LogFAQs > #961884227

34. The Secret Life of Pets 2

Ermine: 2
Red: 18
Inviso: 31
Karo: 35
Johnbobb: 37
Evillord: 37

Total: 160

Ermine: I loved the first film and this one is no exception either. Max is adorable and I love him and Rooster was a fantastic addition to the movie.

I actually think that the idea of a dog going through the stress of having a little kid to look after is a really cool and I WISH that this was more explored throughout the film. What I mean by that is I wish that the whole movie's focus was just on that and got rid of the other side stories that we had to watch. It made the movie feel disjointed and that the writers just wanted to give screen time to the other characters from the first film.

If you take Max's story at the farm with Rooster and make that the whole film, I think it would be awesome... but also likely miss the target audience then. Ah well.

Still, this film makes Max a much more likable character than the first (even though I liked him there too) and Secret Life of Pets is by far and away Illumination's best series, I hope they continue with them, despite how mindless they can be at times! Give me all the dogs.

Red: Secret Life of Pets was one of the more surprisingly decent movies from the last list. The sequel, not so much. We're going on more absurd adventures, we're going to pretend the bunny wasn't a villain and change his character for plot convenience, and everyone is going to get split up because oh god we have to make a sequel and don't know what to do. The characters are still likeable from the first, and that goes a long way to not being low on this list, but we're still suffering some sequelitis like almost half the list.

Inviso: Having made it 3/4 of the way through this list as of this write-up, Ive found that a lot of the sequels from lesser companies (see: not Pixar, kinda Disney/Dreamworks) arethey often feel like quick cash grabs. In the case of Pets 2, the plot feels like its completely all over the place. The first movie was almost entirely around Max feeling like his position was being usurped by a new dog. It was a straight-forward story, with some wackiness and side characters thrown in. Pets 2 felt the need to craft stories for three main characters, and kinda had them come together at the end of the moviebut none of them really feel like they concluded in a decent way.

Max starts out with a story about his owners new kidbut that gets almost completely dropped as the story turns into him overcoming his anxiety. He goes to a farm and meets a sheep dog who trains him, and then the sheep dog leaves with like two thirds of the movie left to go. No real conclusion to HIS story arc other than feeling sad that Max is leaving. Meanwhile, Snowball is pretending to be a superhero and gets enlisted to rescue a captive tiger from the circus, with help from Tiffany Haddish dog. They succeed, but the tiger is tracked down and recaptured, so Snowball (with Max, who is suddenly onboard with this plot after learning of it in the SAME scene as his enlistment) go to rescue the tiger. Much like the sheep dog, Tiffany Haddishs character is missing from the ending, which is weird, given that shes one of the main characters in the film. And finally, Gidget has a whole thing about needing to infiltrate a cat ladys house, so she learns to be a catbut then her plot wraps up easily, and barely needed that whole training sequence, since she uses another solution.

While the plot is super-convoluted, I will give the movie a ton of credit for characterizing the animal characters in a very satisfying fashion (a lot like the original movie). The pets feel like real pets, and the little character moments of animalistic actions are fun and add personality to a film that doesnt hit the plot beats I typically want in a film. The characters are likable, which is more than you can say in a lot of the dumber kids movies on this list.

Karo: The sequel to Illuminations hit-and-miss city animal adventure movie.
Much like the first film, there are three main plots going on simultaneously. One is Gidget trying to recover a lost squeaky toy from the crazy cat lady's apartment, and even though the scenario is kind of arbitrary our little pomeranian puffball again shows why she is the best character in the series.
There also is this extremely dumb story of Snowball becoming a superhero and trying to save a captive circus tiger. While the little bunny has never really been all there mentally, now he has become a complete imbecile on the level of the Minions, and watching him do anything here is extremely excruciating.
But it is the third tale of Max's random farm trip that really makes me uncomfortable, largely due to the introduction of the new character of Rooster the farm dog. Let's just say that if dogs could vote this one would certainly vote for Donald Trump. This wonderful character constantly complains about all the liberal pansy bullshit that the newcomers bring to his farm, such as how they refuse to let a preschooler run around unsupervised and fall off the giant fucking cliff that is apparently right next door.
In one atrocious scene that has aged as well as rancid milk, Rooster literally rips off Max's doggy cone because he thinks protective medical equipment is for pussies.
But the thing that is really bad here is the way the film pushes the idea that Rooster is so cool and awesome and admirable onto the impressible minds of the kids watching the movie. When the main moral of the story is seemingly that our slightly effeminate canine protagonist needs to man up and stop being a little bitch, that is of course going to rub me very the wrong way.
All in all it is an extremely poor followup that learns nothing from what it did wrong and what it did right in the first movie, all while deciding to double down on mostly doing the wrong things, and these parts of the pets lives should have honestly remained secret.

Johnbobb: The first Secret Life of Pets wasn't great. Not terrible, but mostly whatever. But this cash-in, insubstantial sequel is significantly worse, and barely qualifies as a movie. This feels like they tried to make an animated series pilot about Kevin Hart's bunny, but that failed, so they had to squeeze an entire movie runtime out of it. So the literal main character of the movie is sent away on a boring, insignificant B-plot. And Gidget, the funny dog that was really the best part of the first film? She ALSO gets an even more insignificant B-plot.

Evillord: This movie is by Illumination.