My wife Barb and I journeyed to a local theater to watch this last month.  Barb had finally seen the first one, and wanted to see the sequel.  She liked them both.  I was not very impressed with the first one, and little about the sequel is exciting to me either.  There’s just something weird and off-putting to me about this world of kooky animals, all of which have some sort of musical talent that just begs to be displayed.  My analytical side sees this as an exercise in diversity, an argument that no matter one’s looks, one’s background or one’s experience, everyone should be afforded a chance to make good.  No problem.  But it’s still weird and strange to watch a pig interact with a gorilla and a koala and an iguana and a lion and, well, you get the point.

Garth Jennings returns to write and direct this sequel, in which the koala impresario Buster Moon (voice of Matthew McConaughey) feels the need to take his animal friends to Las Vegas-like Redshore City to make it in the big time.  But to do that, he needs to cheat and sneak and lie and convince everyone that he knows what he is doing, and he has to convince retired rock lion legend Clay Calloway (voice of Bono) to stop grieving about his dead wife and take up the guitar again.  Really.

I know kids want entertainment that speaks to them, but does this?  Really?  I’ll give Jennings credit for one aspect — when the big shot producer Jimmy Crystal (voice of Bobby Cannavale) rightly shoots down Moon’s kooky production of Alice in Wonderland, that allows pig Gunter (voice of Nick Kroll) to extol his vision of a science fiction musical.  That at least kept me interested, although the plotting and songs about the four planets being visited were disappointing.

In this era of The Voice and The Masked Singer and even American Idol I think the real appeal of a movie like this is that the audience is treated to actors like Reese Witherspoon and Taron Egerton and Scarlett Johansson and Halsey and Pharrell Williams and Bono sing popular, or formerly popular, songs with which they would be familiar within the confines of the story.  If that’s your thing, enjoy it.  It interests me not at all, other than to hear stars sing.  ☆ ☆.  2 February 2022.