Back Rowe Reviews
Real Time Movie Reviews from the Back Row of a Theater

Rio 2 (G)

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Directed by: Carlos Saldanha
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg
April 2014

This review was originally tweeted in Real-time from the back row of a movie theater and appears @BackRoweReviews. Though efforts were made to tease rather than ruin this movie’s memorable lines and moments, some spoilers may exist in the following evaluation. The original tweets appear in black, while follow-up comments appear in red. For concerns over objectionable content, please first refer to one of the many parental movie guide websites. All ratings are based on a four star system. Happy reading!

Rio 2

Nice tropical sounds added to the 20th Century Fox fanfare.
The percussive rhythms of Carnival.

A blue feather is found in the Amazon.
Right next to the nest of raptor eggs.

Nice tour of Brazil in a storybook montage.
The bird’s-eye vantages of the major cities really help to capture the flavor of this diverse country.

Kristin Chenoweth voices the poisonous frog. Call it a significant career change.
Just further proof that there isn’t anything she can’t do in the biz.

The blue community’s celebration song is brilliantly animated and choreographed.
A visual treat that recalls other such elaborately produced numbers in the first film.

The jungle talent auditions are hilarious.
The male black panther singing high soprano is particularly humorous.

Blue insults the Red leader. This means war.
Insulted Red Leader? Who does he think he is, Luke Skywalker? Correction: Blu.

Fanny Pack single-wingdedly looses the war.

Final analysis: a respectable sequel with some new characters and challenges thrown into the mix.
While some original characters, like George Lopez’ Rafael, are sidelined for much of the movie.

Rating:
2 1/2 out of 4 stars. So will the sequel be called Rio 3 or Amazon 2? I’m so confused.

Such confusion stems from the fact that the majority of the film takes place in the Amazon—only about the first fifteen minutes of the story transpires in the birds’ native haunts in Rio. Whereas it was the right decision to move some of the action away from the familiar settings established in the first film, the sequel spends too much time away from the titular city and should’ve returned there if only for a closing number to provide an adequate bookend for the film. Indeed, one of the subplots (the proposed talent show) would’ve been a natural, logical way to close out the film…but that plot thread is left dangling in the tropical breeze. The familial aspects work really well here, but the writers work overtime at turning Blu into an avian version of Ben Stiller’s character in the Meet the Parents movies. Seeing the blue bird bumble and stumble through every situation grows tedious after a while and the way his one heroic act at the end rectifies all the damage he’s done all movie long is extremely contrived. And speaking of Blu’s defining moment of valor, does anyone else see the connective tissue between clumsy Jar-Jar leading the Gungan attack against the Battle Droid army in Star Wars-Episode I: The Phantom Menace and Blu leading the charge against the humans and their bulldozers here? This heavy-handed means of vilifying humans is old hat. Though conducted on a much smaller scale, this nature-revolts-against-humans finale is virtually identical to the one in FernGully…The Last Rainforest (1992). Whereas I’m certainly not a supporter of deforestation or any other means by which humanity destroys nature, I’m even less sanguine when Hollywood indoctrinates impressionable minds with its diatribes of evil humans and their careless stewardship over the planet (see my review of “Happy Feet” for a rant on the subject). This “humans bad, nature good” final conflict was the only sour note in an otherwise mellifluous animated romp in the jungle. So the question remains: how much of Rio will we get to see in Rio 3?