Runtime: 1 hour, 41 minutes
Rating: G
Director: Carlos Saldanha
Quick Impressions:
When I first saw Rio in the theater, I thought it was simply an okay story with decent animation, brilliant use of color, and catchy music. But Rio is one of those movies that grows on you with multiple viewings. My mother loves to pop in the Blu-ray when she’s doing housework, and quite honestly, you don’t even have to start the film to fall in love with it. That opening musical sequence playing over and over again is quite infectious enough to provide hours of entertainment all by itself. So naturally, we were all very excited to see Rio 2.
Apparently my five-year-old was so excited that just after waking up this morning, she put a banana on her nose and announced that she was a toucan. I wasn’t there to witness this delightful episode, but I know all about it because she recounted it to me in a very loud whisper while I was trying to watch the movie this afternoon. Fortunately, all the other kids in the theater were whispering, too—when they weren’t singing along, gasping in alarm, or bursting into giggles and falling out of their seats.
The Good:
Rio 2 is a consistently, constantly entertaining movie. The songs are wonderful, and as the film goes on, the musical numbers just keep getting better and more frequent. The visuals are fantastic, too. Director Carlos Saldanha is from Rio, and he’s really done a fantastic job of bringing his home town to glorious life for eager young movie goers around the globe. This time we get to see more than just Rio, too. We bounce all over Brazil and finally end up in the Amazonian jungle in a beautiful treetop paradise where humans seldom go. It’s pretty great.
The plot of the movie—or should I say plots, since there are about fifteen hundred unfolding concurrently—is pretty simple and doesn’t matter much. All that really matters are these three things: 1) Families should love each other and stick together. 2) People should not destroy the rainforest 3) Bruno Mars may be more impressive than Jesse Eisenberg in every way possible but that doesn’t matter in the end because in the end, the movie is over.
Another important thing to remember this time around is that Jemaine Clement is back in the movie playing Nigel, the now even more damaged and demented bad bird. The audience really loves Nigel, and that’s a good thing since we’re basically the only ones who even realize he’s in the movie. The other characters have enough on their plates without even acknowledging him.
This is a great but busy movie. Nothing that happens is too important (except the emotional journey of Blu), but you’ll never want to look away because it’s all so pretty and enchanting. Kids love it, and adults would have to be bringing baggage with them to hate it, in my opinion.
Best Scene/Best Scene Visually:
The entire movie is absolutely gorgeous, featuring rich, vibrant colors and aesthetically pleasing locales that are so easy on the eyes. Imagine a wonderful candy that tastes sweet as the rainbow but despite its teeming sugar content, relaxes you into a pleasant trance. That’s basically what your eyes are in for as you keep them fixed on the screen during this movie. I guess it’s like watching a really pretty, swirly margarita.
But the scene I found the most breathtaking and delightful was the dance of the blue macaws that takes place not long after Blu and Jewel’s arrival in the Amazon colony. I remember thinking at the time, This must be the big, show-stopping number in this movie. But I was wrong. Practically every other song after that was just as compelling. Visually, though, this was the cream of the crop.
I also like the bit with Nico’s hat.
Best Song:
I’m very fond of Nigel and Gabi’s bizarre romantic duet (I say bizarre because in traditional romances, one of the lovers isn’t unconscious). (Traditionally both are unconscious.) (Just kidding.) This is really not the most impressive song in musical terms, but the lyrics are sort of delightful, and the whole thing has a grand, tragic silliness that I really enjoyed.
Honestly, though, all the songs in the movie are good. There seem to be millions of them. The soundtrack must be phenomenal, even better than the soundtrack to the first Rio.
Funniest Scene:
Nico and Pedro’s Carnival auditions cracked up practically every kid in the entire theater. (We were sitting against the back wall, so we could see everyone.) My own kids were laughing. I was laughing. The two little kids sitting next to me were laughing. Their baby sister was saying, “Dadadadadada,” which I understood as the sound of infant joy.
Seriously, everybody loved this part. Now don’t expect the height of novel wit. It’s just very silly and fun, and the energy and hilarity build as the segment progresses.
One child seated at the other end of our row even repeated a line that he found particularly hilarious, then burst into peals of giggles.
Even if you’re cynical enough to withhold every chuckle while watching the comedy onscreen, I dare you not to smile to yourself at the reaction of the audience.
The Carnival auditions made everybody happy (with the possible exception of Nico, Pedro, and a succession of unwitting delicacies).
Best Joke for Adults:
Anyone who has taken a family road trip recently should appreciate the frequent GPS jokes. If you’re like us, you’ve surely noticed that no matter how well the GPS works under ideal conditions, the moment you really need to find a Texas Roadhouse quick, you invariably wind up in a run-down residential area next to a sketchy sign reading “The Tomb of Abraham Lincoln” with an arrow that seems to point into an iffy-looking garage. Or is that just us? (Either way, next time we drive to Chicago, we are not stopping for dinner in Springfield, Illinois!)
These jokes aren’t all that clever, but they’re extremely honest, and for that reason, they really resonate. I found myself waiting in delight for the next one, and there was always a next one coming.
There’s also a pretty funny line late in the movie that seems like kind of an inside joke to me (or at least, an associative joke). Gabi the frog (voiced by Kristin Chenoweth) is involved in an exchange that to me seems to be a sly reference to Disney’s Frozen. Maybe I’m reaching here, but Chenoweth and Idina Menzel did star in Wicked together on Broadway, and my husband got the same impression I did. Watch for yourself and see what you think.
I also love the way Roberto says goodnight to Blu.
Best Action Sequence:
If you don’t count the unpredictable blow dart fight the kids sitting next to me were having with their Icee straws (which certainly kept me on the edge of my seat), then probably the best action sequence comes near the very end when all the birds band together against a common enemy.
It’s nice to see Blu get some respect for once. Plus at this point, the worst of the interpersonal is largely resolved. (I thought of rewording that but on further reflection see no reason why a bird could not have a persona just as legitimately as anyone else.)
My daughter was so stressed out by the family turmoil. Last week she had no problem at all with Captain America and all its intense violence. But hurt feelings within a family group? She kept putting her hands over her eyes and looking away, whining vaguely in distress that she “couldn’t stand much more of this.” At one point, she informed me, “If it weren’t for my peanut M&Ms, I wouldn’t stay here another minute!” She just doesn’t cope well when friends don’t get along.
So she was absolutely delighted (as she always is) to see the villains get their come-uppance and the heroes all make friends with each other at the end. (That shouldn’t be a spoiler. If you’ve seen the first film, then you know that in the Rio universe, at the end of the movie, all of the good guys make friends, and all of the bad guys meet a terrible, yet G-rated fate.)
The Negatives:
This movie is a lot like Carnival, absolutely stuffed—well past the point of saturation or even sanity—with colorful characters possessing boundless energy. I wouldn’t call the movie overplotted exactly (because the plot is pretty straightforward), but it does have far more antagonists than anyone needs and a number of subplots that could easily be trimmed for time. (The difficulty would be in deciding what to keep and what to cut since, honestly, nothing that happens matters very much.)
To be honest, the conflict with the other blue macaws is really conflict enough to sustain the movie, particularly because it affects Blu (the protagonist) so profoundly. Jesse Eisenberg is still definitely the film’s star, and he does have a substantial role. His co-stars are not so lucky, however. There are just so many voices to hear, so many stories to tell.
In some ways, the addition of the sinister logging thugs is completely superfluous. The only reasons that logging subplot matters are 1) It provides a way of solving the conflict in the main plot. 2) It teaches kids not to destroy vulnerable eco-systems.
(You could argue that the logging plot is the main plot, but I’m privileging the struggles of the film’s protagonist, Blu.)
Now, of course, it’s nice that the Tulio-and-Linda Vs. Loggers plot intersects with the Blu Vs. the Other Macaws plot because each storyline provides the solution necessary to resolving the other. But still, the result of cramming in both plotlines is that none of the supporting characters gets much time. We really hardly see Linda and Tulio, let alone the cabal of wicked new villains led by Miguel Ferrer who has more lollipops than lines in the movie!
We get a lot more time with the new birds, but there are so many new birds, so most of them get overlooked, too. Roberto (voiced by Bruno Mars) gets some high-profile, choice moments, and it’s impossible to be an adult and not notice that Andy Garcia is playing Eduardo. Garcia seems to have twice the lines he does because of his dominating presence. But then there are all these other new birds we spend practically no time with at all (and one of them is even voiced by Rita Moreno!).
Even Anne Hathaway as Jewel has a dramatically reduced role this time around. The character is still crucial, but she seems to have fewer lines. (I don’t know if she actually does or if it’s just a perception thing since she’s fighting to share the screen with about 467,000 other characters, both new and old, friend and foe.)
Friends from the first movie like Rafael (George Lopez) and Luiz (Tracy Morgan) do appear, but for essentially no reason, in roles so reduced that they’re basically glorified cameos. Nico (Jamie Foxx) and Pedro (Will i Am) still provide comic relief throughout the film, but that’s basically all they’re there for. Plotwise, they are really not doing anything important.
And then we come to Nigel, Gabi, and that anteater. To be brutally frank, there is absolutely no reason for them to be in the movie. Nigel may be the tragic hero of his own imagination, but for about 99 percent of the movie, the other characters (the supposed nemeses he’s actively plotting against) don’t even have any idea that he’s there. And then when they do find out, it only matters for like two seconds. Jemaine Clement and Kristin Chenoweth are great, but they’re not what you’d call essential plotwise (unless you consider Nigel an antagonistic co-protagonist, so that his story matters just as much as Blu’s.)
Of course, as far as I’m concerned a villain who travels by anteater while plotting revenge and quoting Shakespeare is perfectly welcome in any movie, relevance be darned! (That sounds odd, but the movie is G-rated, so the review probably should be, too.) Actually, it’s funny that Nigel keeps quoting Shakespeare because along with clowns Nico and Pedro, he and his crew seem to be operating within a decidedly Shakespearean comedic subplot, the kind that barely affects the main story. (Honestly, all together, they remind me a bit of the supporting characters in Twelfth Night. They’re constantly up to something, but the actual protagonists seem to have almost no awareness of them.)
One other weird thing is that right before the feature, the theater re-showed the Dreamworks short (with Steve Martin and the aliens) that originally played before Mr. Peabody & Sherman. Did Blue Sky prepare a short that got pulled at the last minute or something?
Overall:
Rio 2 is absolutely jam-packed and overflowing with all kinds of attention-grabbing material, so let’s face it, you’re bound to like some of it. I have a hard time imagining anyone hating this movie. It’s so thoroughly pleasant, so manically determined to pull out all the stops to give the people what they want—pretty birds singing catchy tunes. (It’s kind of like if cartoon versions of Jamie Foxx and Will i am took over the Tiki Room in Disneyland.)
If you liked the music and visual art in the first Rio, then you should like what you see here. The soundtrack surely contains even more rousing numbers than before, and the visuals are both rousing and relaxing simultaneously. It’s also a great way to get excited about the 2016 summer games and to introduce your kids to the rainforest and ecological responsibility.
If you liked Rio, you’ll like Rio 2. It delivers exactly what it promises, and it’s rated G, too, which is a rarity these days even in children’s entertainment.