Illumination Entertainment is another animation group that is taking a chunk out of this golden age we have of Animated Filmmaking.
The original Secret Life of Pets (Juice Rating 76/100) was a fun inventive idea of what do people’s pets do when the owners go to work or school. We saw friendships get made with pets in the buildings and adventures had with all different types of animals. When I heard they were doing a sequel, and replacing Louis C.K. as the main dog Max (for obvious reasons) I was pretty excited. After walking out of the theatre I was feeling honestly, pretty meh about it. It seems they used a lot of the good material up in the original and this one failed to capture the magic.
Lets get to the grades and I will discuss further:
Animation – B+ Pretty much all of the animation was about as good as it could have been with this. All the landscapes and buildings looked great and the animals all looked realistic. I was just not completely overwhelmed with the Animation as I am with some others like this movie.
Voice Cast – B Patton Oswalt did a great job replacing Louis and the rest of the cast was fun and lively most of the time. Eric Stonestreet, Kevin Hart, Jenny Slate, Dana Carvey, and many more brought the energy, I even enjoyed Tiffany Haddish after her BRUTAL turn in the Lego Movie 2. The only person I really did not enjoy was Harrison Ford which is weird because I love the guy as an actor. It just felt like he was mailing it in for the check on this one.
Music – C The score overall was pretty solid, however there really was not that one catchy song that you can remember from this. Every great Animated movie has one memorable song and this just did not have it.
Story – D This is where the movie really went off the rails. They split the story into three distinct settings that they planned on ultimately coming together. This idea in theory was interesting but it was edited very poorly and every time you felt like the momentum was going on one of the stories, it would switch and kill the moment. I did not like the format and I was in a theatre with a ton of kids and no one was laughing at all, I took that as a bad sign. This was just kinda boring to be honest and not a great use of a great cast and idea.
*A couple other tidbits
- Not nearly enough of just the animals hanging out doing funny stuff.
- The Rooster and Max relationship made no sense given how short the movie was.
This movie is fine and kids will probably enjoy it, it is for sure not one of Illuminations best though. I think the pets trope is probably tired now and hopefully we see something fresh in the future.
Juice Rating:
*All of my movie ratings can be found here.
*Illumination rankings are below.