In a lot of ways, it’s still surprising that Chris Miller and Phil Lord managed to make a movie out of the Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs book. It was unexpected film for me just in how much I enjoyed it and it set these two men off on a pretty interesting film career from there on out. They didn’t come back for the sequel last year though, which was directed by Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn with a whole different team doing the screenplay, though Lord and Miller worked on the story as well. The film was made for $22 million less and made about $30 million more than the first one.
And it was the first movie in a long time that I felt like just walking out of.
While we get most of the same characters back, all the charm and fun of the first is ejected in favor of just doing weird things for the sake of weird because a machine has gone crazy and it’s all just chaos from there. Everything feels like it’s overacting and over-animating, which had it just far too busy and active when it didn’t need to be. The story is simple enough, but it just lacks and kind of charm to it as it felt like it lost its soul a whole lot.
It’s one of the rare times where a sequel has lessened my interest in revisiting the first film.
