Review: 'Sing 2' Sweet and Stuffed with Fun

There's a turning point in "Sing 2" where actual human (or animal) emotion is tied to the musical journey. Scarlett Johansson's porcupine strums on guitar and sings "Stuck in a Moment..." to Bono's lion, who is indeed stuck in the moment he lost his wife, decades ago, and stopped performing.

This quiet, tender and reasonably well-earned dramatic connection stands in contrast to most of the movie: A spinning, whizzing, frenetic, post-TikTok extended video where animals shout snippets of music-catalogue nostalgia at parents while engaging in crazy animal dance moves to the delight of the kids in attendance. The movie does this with the polish of a first-rate team of animators, vocal actors, cinematographers, and directors. This keeps audiences from over analyzing the narrative, the stereotypes, or the sense that their teeth are starting to get cavities from how stuffed with sweetness this movie is.

For the most part the movie works, and there's a good amount to admire about it. Our formerly down on his luck theater impresario turned director of a Vegas-style spectacular (Matthew McConaughey as Buster Moon, a koala) is staging an outer space space opera with his cast of small-town misfits from the original movie. The production designers create a city and a show that one-ups Las Vegas but could still be in a Cirque du Soleil show launching in a few years. In the world of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos going to space, it's imaginable, if not possible today.

This gives the movie the feel – and joy – of living inside a very realistic video game world, more so than many movies set in video game worlds. In addition, the writers created an actual, plausible reason for these characters to be together. The narrative moves several key characters forward from the first movie, including Reese Witherspoon's housewife pig, Tori Kelly's shy elephant, Taron Egerton's criminal chimpanzee, and Ms. Johansson's punk porcupine. The addition of Bobby Canavale as a Trump-esque gambling magnate of questionable morals and judgement is fun as are the contributions of Letitia Wright, Halsey, and Bono.

It's hard not to admire a movie who's entire raison d'être seems to be to make audiences smile every single minute. It's stuffed with gags, snippets of song, and enough animals swinging from cables to make P!nk envious.

If "Sing" was modeled on "American Idol" and "Pitch Perfect," "Sing 2" shares its DNA with "Mama Mia" and "Magic Mike XXL." It sings. It dances. It allows audiences not to think about the state of the world for 110 minutes.

"Sing 2" - AVAILABLE ON DIGITAL MARCH 1, 2022, AND
ON BLU-RAY MARCH 29, 2022