Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sing 2’ on VOD, an Animated Musical Karaoke Machine Trying to Pass as a Movie

Sing 2 arrives on VOD just in time to remind us that a whole bunch of pop songs we’ve heard a million times still exist. Whew – “Bad Guy” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” might’ve lost some of their universal omnipresence without it! The first Sing was enough of a monetary success in 2016 for some studio accountants to justify the existence of a sequel, so here we are, with writer/director Garth Jennings once again at the helm, rounding up a few newcomers – most notably Bono, from on high – to join a goodly chunk of the original voice cast. Will more be better or will more just be more and will we care if we’re older than 11? I sigh a little as I say this: Let’s find out.

SING 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Meena the elephant (Tori Kelly) treks through a weird forest and falls into a hole and finds herself in a weird secret garden full of animals playing and singing a Prince song. It’s an elaborate musical stage production of Alice in Wonderland and the song is “Let’s go Crazy,” a perfect pop composition rendered gutless by the removal of the big cataclysmic climactic guitar solo, so good job there, Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey), a koala who’s the Kermit the Frog of this humble theater. Mid-musical, he’s alerted to the presence of Suki (Chelsea Peretti), a big-time talent scout, in the audience – a haughty big-time talent scout who’s a dog and also is leaving halfway through. Buster chases her down and she says they’d never be good enough for the big time, namely Redshore City, which is the talking-cartoon-animal equivalent of Las Vegas, and, as logic dictates, is therefore even more obnoxious than Las Vegas.

Honked off, Buster decides it’s time to round up his crew and take a bus to Redshore, a sequence that takes far longer than it should to complete, but hey, there are SO MANY pop songs from the last several decades to wedge into this thing. They sneak into an audition hosted by entertainment mogul Jimmy Crystal (Bobby Cannavale), who isn’t impressed by anything, and also is an arctic wolf, so watch out. Buster spitballs an idea about a big sci-fi musical extravaganza, and Jimmy bites on it. Now all they have to do is conceptualize and write and cast and choreograph it. No sweat!

And so it all goes smoothly and they sing and dance and act and people love it, the end. No! Actually, there are problems. Rosita the pig (Reese Witherspoon) takes the lead role but is afraid of heights for a big high-wire flying bit, and is replaced by Jimmy’s daughter Porsha (Halsey), who can’t act her way out of a wet paper bag, and also pronounces a hard “c” in “sci-fi.” Tommy the gorilla (Taron Egorton) struggles to learn the dance moves orchestrated by rude choreographer Klaus Kickenklober the proboscis monkey (Adam Buxton), so he’s tutored by Nooshy the lynx (Letitia Wright). Meena has a huge crush on ice cream vendor elephant Alfonso (Pharrell Williams), but is too shy to talk to him, a subplot that has nothing to do with Buster’s musical, but Pharrell Williams wasn’t cast in this thing to end up on the cutting-room floor. In a less extraneous development, Meena struggles to perform a duet with a vainglorious yak named Darius (Eric Andre). And finally, this is the big one, the whole shebang hinges on Buster coaxing rock-star lion Clay Calloway (Bono) out of reclusive retirement to duet a U2 song with Ash the rockin’ porcupine (Scarlett Johansson) during the big show-closing number. I wonder what eternally unavoidable song by U2 it’ll be? NO SPOILERS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: An ambitious sci-fi musical, eh? Sing 2 should be more like tick… tick… TOON!, right? Right? Hello?

OK, real answer: Trolls and Rock of Ages in its jukebox-musicalness, Hotel Transylvania 4 in its utter inessentialness.

Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Bono’s voice doesn’t sound quite like Bono’s voice, so I think he’s actually acting here.

Memorable Dialogue: Gunter the pig (Nick Kroll, and yes, there’s yet another character in this movie): “Mama always said, ‘Gunter, you’re not as stupid as your papa!’”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The world does not need 110 minutes of Sing 2, with its too many characters, too many subplots that go plotz and not enough fresh jokes. But it’s got plenty of music, great heaping wads of it, arranged like a scatterbrain’s playlist and spiked with a new U2 song that Teflons right into the sea as this movie motors on and on (and on). If you’ve always wanted to see a glass-eyed old-lady chameleon sing along with System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” while driving a Lamborghini, well shee-it, this is the movie for you!

That might be the best gag in this whole endeavor, which otherwise mines the same old comedio-dramatic territory of dozens of other up-against-the-wall high-pressure entertainment-biz the-show-must-go-on plots. It’s scads of frosting and very little cake, teasing eensy bits of stick-to-it-iveness and passion-for-the-arts lessons out of the karaoke and sentimental treacle. Maybe its characterization of Jimmy Crystal as a rampantly abusive producer-mogul satirizes the far-too-many real-life examples of such; maybe that’s a reach, and he’s just a Villain of Convenience in a story template that demands such things; maybe it’s sort of a horrible thing to put in a kid’s movie. It looks terrific, colorful, vibrant and dynamic, but who cares? It’s empty and forgettable. Trolls whups its ass.

Our Call: Sing 2 is a big fat whatever for me. SKIP IT unless the children in your life demand otherwise, because if anyone will relish the significance of a heavens-to-Murgatroyd Bono-Scarlett Johansson duet, it’s definitely seven-year-olds.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.