Wreck-It Ralph 2

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Re: Wreck-It Ralph 2

Post by James » November 29th, 2018, 10:14 am

Eric, thanks for spoiler tagging a bunch of your post. I’m sure people will appreciate that. Just a heads up that I added one more just to be safe!

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Re: Wreck-It Ralph 2

Post by Ben » March 27th, 2019, 8:33 am

So this was a frankly hysterical movie!

For the first half anyway...

Actually, that sounds faintly damming, which wouldn’t be fair. It was a really enjoyable, fun-packed big joke of a movie, which was our midweek movie night choice last night. But maybe where it went wrong was when it was trying to be sincere, after it had set up so many screwey elements. The first film, smaller in scale, had the room to dart around and bring layer to the characters, but here everything was big and showy.

Character development had been done in th first film, so there was little reason to bring any more depth to them here: indeed, the whole setup felt decidedly infected with sequelitis, with little reason for plot other than to set something in motion so as to get another film out of the franchise. In so far as itself, that’s not actually always a problem, when you can build on a first film and bring more to it. Ralph 2, however, wants its cake and to eat it. When it’s fun, it’s very, very fun, but then it wants to add a bit of depth to the primary two characters...and it’s just not that kind of film.

Better would have been to play it really as a fast and straight comedy all the way through. And as such the film really, really works as a hugely enjoyable fun-fest that kept our audience of 15 or so laughing all the way through. But the ending - no spoilers, but I’m not taking about the way things were resolved, but the big showdown - sort of dragged things down a notch or two and actually became a little dull for a moment.

Sure, it was incredibly animated, and the Ralph-monster thing was amazingly impressively done, but nothing seemed to happen for a while. I was okay with how things wrap up, and the door is open for more, but next time I kind of hope they don’t try and stretch the character dynamics further again and let some new supporting characters come in to carry the drama.

What was also good was that things didn’t always go the way you could kind of see coming a mile off, so there were a couple of surprises in that there were *no* surprises, but at the same time I think this could have been even more successful as a straighter comic movie, without the shallow soul searching.

That all said, we all enjoyed this big time, perhaps more so than Incredibles 2. My copy of Into The Spider-Verse just showed up, so it’ll be interesting to see how that stacks up against the previous two, but my early guess is that it did indeed deserve its Oscar win. It’ll be a few weeks before we get to that, though, what with everything else already pencilled in!

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