Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013)
Directed by Kris Pearn
After the disastrous food storm in the first film, Flint and his friends are forced to leave the town. Flint accepts the invitation from his idol Chester V to join The Live Corp Company, which has been tasked to clean the island, and where the best inventors in the world create technologies for the betterment of mankind. When Flint discovers that his machine still operates and now creates mutant food beasts like living pickles, hungry tacodiles, shrimpanzees and apple pie-thons, he and his friends must return to save the world.
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What critics compared Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 to
"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2," in contrast, takes its inspiration from Spielberg and Michael Crichton -- from "Jurassic Park" and its many "lost world" forebears, dating back to "King Kong," Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Upon their arrival, the group finds a thriving ecosystem of living food shown off in sequences paying direct homage to the dinosaur habitats in Jurassic Park.
The whole movie feels like some Jurassic Park homage, complete with the scenes of wonderment as Flint and his pals all return to the island to see what destruction he has wrought with his invention.
But when the friends — voiced by Bill Hader, Anna Faris and Neil Patrick Harris (as a scene-stealing talking monkey) — return to their island home, which has become overrun by living food products, the film loses its originality and instead pays homage to “Jurassic Park” as if set in Oz.
Even stranger, once back in Swallow Falls, “Cloudy 2” proceeds to lift scenes, references and bits of dialogue from “Jurassic Park.”
The latest installment in what will surely be a series borrows heavily from Jurassic Park and offers some pleasantly pun-heavy production design, but the novelty has worn a bit.
The film could have looked for inspiration from more intelligent animated films in this genre like 2008’s “WALL•E” from Andrew Stanton and 2009’s “Up” from Pete Docter and Bob Peterson.
(Naturally, Hader brings along all his old celeb-voiced friends, though the overzealous policeman is now played by Terry Crews instead of Mr. T.) While the technical department offers a cornucopia of visual treats, the writers mostly serve leftovers; their plot reheats several elements from Pixar’s Up , including a tropical-paradise setting, a personal idol who turns out to be a scoundrel, and an animal sidekick with a translator.
Usually a project from the likes of Pixar, it isn't just a film -- it is a work of visual wonder, along the lines of the superbly crafted " Wall*E " and " Up ."