Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was a surprisingly touching and fun film that also had a big dollop of surreal weirdness.  It was also a surprise success so naturally we now have a sequel on our hands.  The rather boringly named Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 is that sequel and has seen most of the original cast return apart from Mr. T who has been replaced by Terry Crews as Eric Devereaux.

The story starts 8 minutes after the end of the first film and see’s Flint Lockwood’s (Bill Hader) hero Chester V (Will Forte) coming to Swallow Falls to assist in the disposal of all the left over food.  While this happens the residents have to move to San Franjose, California where Flint is offered a job at Live Corp. the company owned by Chester V.  6 months later, after humiliating himself at a company meeting due to his party in a box, Chester asks Lockwood to return to Swallow Falls, with love interest Sam Sparks (Anna Faris), his dad (James Caan), Manny the cameraman (Benjamin Bratt), Brent the Chicken (Andy Samberg) and police officer Earl Devereaux, in an attempt to shut down the FLDSMDFR (the machine from the first film) which is now creating food animals or ‘foodimals’ that have taken over the island.

The biggest test as to whether you will enjoy this movie is whether you find puns like shrimpanzee and tacodile funny.  They are very much the backbone of what this tale is about and there really is some fantastic word play in there, that I won’t ruin for you.  The plot itself is obviously ludicrous and  the character relationships are not quite as sweet, particularly between Flint and his Dad, this time round as it almost feels like there are too many central characters for you to get overly attached to any of them.  Despite this, it does all hold together well enough to allow you to focus on the sight gags and puns that are really this films bread and butter.

Saying that there is a very strange idea in this film, that suggests it’s not okay to eat these ‘foodimals’ because they are living breathing creatures, which doesn’t really make sense when you consider we are a society that kills and eats animals regularly.  However, looking into the plot that much is really over analysing it and you should just sit back and laugh at the cute talking strawberry.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 isn’t as good as the first and doesn’t quite rival the fantastic Pixar animated cannon.  However, if you’re a parent or just a fan of films of this genre and need something to go and see at the cinema, you could do far worse.  It’s worth it just for the joke involving the leek to be honest.