Saturday, April 3, 2021

Trolls World Tour - A Larger Scale Sequel but not Much More Enjoyable than its Predecessor

This movie was supposed to be playing in cinemas last year but due to the pandemic, the producers decided to release only in limited US theaters and Video on Demand. After a year though, I finally got the chance to watch this on HBO and HBO Go application. OK, let's have some fun now.

Brief Story Line

After the events in Trolls, Poppy (Anna Kendrick - A Simple FavorThe Accountant etc) has become a queen and living a fun and peaceful life with everyone including her best friend Branch (Justin Timberlake - In Time, Bad Teacher etc). However, it turned out there were other tribes in the Trolls kingdom who prefer their own music where Queen Barb (Rachel Bloom - The Angry Birds Movie 2 etc) wanted to unite all tribes under Rock while eliminating other type of music.

Poppy being her usual positive minded Troll wanted to save the music and embarked on a journey together with Branch and Biggie (James Corden - Peter Rabbit etc). During their journey, they would meet lots of different trolls along the way such as the mayor of Country Trolls Delta Dawn (Kelly Clarkson), Hickory (Sam Rockwell - Richard Jewell, Jojo Rabbit etc) and few others.

So what would happen to Poppy and friends? You could find them all in this quite fun movie.

End of Brief Story Line

You know, the only thing I remembered about watching the first movie was the fun feeling plus the nice song by Justin Timberlake. So when I watched this sequel, I thought it was quite smart of the writers to create this story and include other music genre with lots of songs that were mostly enjoyable to listen to. At first it was a lot of fun, but as the story progressed, somehow I personally felt there were too many characters that they tried to include into this movie for the sake of variety. I think the main story itself was already sufficient to keep us invested in the movie.

This film did give me some laugh out loud moments usually involving the character Biggie and sometimes Branch. Many songs that I liked in here were the songs that I was familiar with. Too bad the supposedly main song Just Sing was not as nice as the main one in the original and frankly I was a bit disappointed. In fact the only new song in this sequel that I personally liked was It's All Love. However, I like the one where they managed to mash up several songs like the time where Poppy, Branch and Biggie sang in the Country town. Btw, there was no mid or post end credit scene but you are welcome to watch the closing credits to see few funny animation of the trolls accompanied by songs 

This movie was still using the same formula as its predecessor with colorful background and characters plus some hilarious scenes, albeit some of them were a bit absurd but still funny. I noticed it was categorized as PG so probably not as safe as I thought would be for all ages. Majority of the main characters in the first film did not have large screen time here and replaced with many new characters. Aside from the cast I mentioned in the brief story line, there were also other quite well known singers  like Ozzy Osbourne, Mary J. Blige, George Clinton, rapper Anderson .Paak and even K-pop group Red Velvet.  

Overall, this movie was quite enjoyable if you are just looking for fun. There were quite a lot of music variety to entertain you. However despite the creativity of making up such story for the sequel, I felt the simple story of the first movie made that more likable for me personally. So if you like the first one, then you would most likely enjoy this as well. Although, even if this is grander in term of larger number of well known singers and various genre of music, but not necessarily better to my opinion. Anyway, those of you who did not get the chance to watch this, it's now available on HBO Go and HBO.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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