Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation

Running Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

Rating: PG

Synopsis:

After his food creation machine went haywire and almost destroyed his home of Swallow Falls, Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) and his friends are evacuated to a new city while their town is being cleaned up. Flint gets hired by his hero Chester V (Will Forte) to work at Live Corp as an inventor, but he misses out on his dream promotion and feels like a failure. When the crew sent to clean up Swallow Falls goes missing, their last video transmission shows that not only is Flint's food machine still working, it is creating new and dangerous food/animal hybrids that pose a threat to the rest of the world. In order to prove his worth to Chester V, Flint gathers his friends together and leads an expedition to find his machine and shut it down once and for all.

Scott's Review:

Be aware, if you go to see Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, you are seeing a KIDS movie. Everything in the film is aimed at 6-10 year olds and proudly so. The animation is significantly less sophisticated than most films of this type these days, but it lends itself to the film's sense of humor. The voice work is the movie's biggest strength. Terry Crews and Benjamin Bratt constantly get laughs as supporting characters Earl and Manny. The other thing that saves this movie for me is that the jokes never stop coming at you. Not every joke works, but the sheer volume of them means that some of them are guaranteed to get you. I am glad I saw it with my three nephews, because watching their gleeful reactions to the movie made me enjoy it a lot more than I would have on my own. C+

Krista's Review: 

The strengths in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 are the strong voice acting and plenty of jokes.  The creators also came up with some pretty inventive food animals.  However, I found too many problems to really enjoy the film.  Most of the funniest scenes I had already seen by the movie trailers, the theme of the movie was weak, and the resolution of the conflict was not very satisfying.  I was also hoping that some of the humor would be directed to the adults.  The movie is successful for children, but doesn't work as well for adults.  C