How To Train Your Dragon 2 (2014)

How To Train Your Dragon 2 (PG)

"Toothless Times Two"

Hiccup and his scaly friends return in Dreamwork's sequel to one of it's most successful films to date (both artistically and financially), but stumbles away from what was new and inventive in the first and falls prey to heavy sequelitis in HTTYD2.

First off, the art has been improved ever so much, so that the small annoying flaws from the first are now gone and so rendering the film gorgeous to behold.  The entire voice cast returns, but the entire film has a sense of arrested development.  Now that Hiccup has converted his village into a Pro-Dragon land (gee that was easy, but technology often makes such leaps), he is out to convert the world.  This return to innocence leads to Hiccups naivety being exploited by the wrong people, a warlord out to enslave all of Dragon-kind for his purposes.

The movie also tries to tie this into the unspoken fate of Hiccup's mother, and here is where the heart goes missing.  The mother's disappearance and reappearance does not ring emotionally close to true, even with the great (if overused) Cate Blanchett pouring eccentricity into the role.  The Warlord Drago is as one-dimensional as villains come, his lines are growled and shouted and he has absolutely no story beyond "He is evil because that's the way he is".  The stupid choices and arrogance displayed by our heroes frustrates, its like the first film never happened and no one learned.  And much like other sequels DW has done, anything that worked in the first will work even better in the first!  So bit characters that were kind of amusing are front and center now and do too much.  Instead of inventing new and interesting characters and scenarios the movie leans on what came before.

As pretty as it is, the movie's tedious retread is in defiance of the first's inventiveness.  A more tried and true sequel would have been difficult, but this film reeks of brand control, concession sales and without the care of good story telling and true emotion that so marked the first.  Sure the dragons are cute and everyone is 5 years older (and the kids are still not Scottish or lost their now-annoying teenage mannerisms), but when compared to the first HTTYD2 loses more than it's foot this time, and apparently lost due to shooting itself there.

5 Where's The Viking Helmet Bra Continuity out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)