Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs was one of the best films of 2009, a sweet, surreal fairytale about ice-cream blizzards, bananas as big as airplanes, and scientific progress gone mad.
Cloudy 2, the profitable, disappointing follow-up, picks up minutes after inventor Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) has saved the world from a food apocalypse. He has just enough time to sketch out plans for a research lab with his meteorologist pal Samantha Sparks (Anna Faris) before genteel inventor Chester Vee (Will Forte) arrives on the scene. Chester whisks Flint and his crew off to San Franjose, California, where he offers Flint a chance to join his research team. But it’s quickly apparent that Chester has other, darker plans for our shock-haired hero.
The balding, goateed, boneless Chester Vee is, among other things, Cloudy‘s savage parody of a Silicon Valley technocrat. His interests are yoga and solipsism — he surrounds himself with identical holograms, which paint his likeness on the Mona Lisa — and his refined exterior conceals a merciless core.
The film relies overmuch on some deadly puns once Flint and company return to their island home, which is now overrun by “living food” — “shrimpanzees,” “watermelephants,” etc. Fortunately, there are a few expertly constructed slapstick sequences as well. Two of them involve Flint and a sentient strawberry; another takes place in a syrup swamp where butterfrogs sit on pancake lilypads and snatch “mosquitoasts” out of the air with their unsalted tongues.
In Colorado and Washington, this film will rake in the cash.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
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