Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009)

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel arrives as the second installment of a franchise that has already made peace with its own limitations. Betty Thomas directs with the light camp touch she brought to The Brady Bunch Movie, which is to say she knows exactly what she is making and does not apologize for it. The plot is a bake sale with a soundtrack: three chipmunks return to school, a music program needs $25,000, and a rival trio of chipmunks, the Chipettes, emerges from a FedEx package to complicate matters. Dave is in a Paris hospital. A cousin named Toby is in charge. The stakes are a check.

The film's social imagination is modest and mostly accidental. Ian Hawke, the disgraced record executive, lives in the basement of his former company and schemes to rebuild his career, which lends the proceedings a faint whiff of resentment toward the music industry, though it is the oldest villain in the catalog. The Chipettes show flashes of self-advocacy, most notably when Brittany insists that all three perform together or none of them do, a moment of solidarity the film treats as plot mechanics instead of a thesis. A few minority performers appear in supporting roles and the film makes no comment on them, which is its own kind of honesty. There is no sermonizing, no environmental conscience, no attention to bodies or minds or history. The chipmunks want to win a contest.

What remains is slapstick, cover songs, and a rat stealing a muffin. Critics were unmoved; audiences handed it an A and $443 million. It is a film entirely innocent of ideology, which is neither a virtue nor a crime. It is simply a product, and a brisk one.