High School Musical 2 (2007)

High School Musical 2 arrives as the second installment of a franchise that has already made its peace with being a television event, and it wears that status without apology. The Wildcats decamp to the Lava Springs Country Club, where the children of means summer and the children of everyone else work the snack bar. The film glances at this arrangement, notes that being served by your friends is uncomfortable, and then moves along to the next musical number. That is the full extent of its economic thinking. There exists a version of this story that ends with a redistribution of the club's assets. This is not that version.

Sharpay Evans remains the engine of the plot, scheming with a focus that borders on the managerial, and the young women around her, Gabriella, Taylor, and Kelsi, all make decisions that shape the outcome. The film grants them agency without ever announcing that it is doing so, which is either a sign of confidence or a sign that nobody involved was thinking about it at all. The ensemble is notably diverse for a 2007 Disney Channel production, with Black, Latina, and white performers sharing the frame as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. It is not treated as a statement, and it is not one.

Elsewhere the film is a museum of absences. No character wrestles with identity in the modern therapeutic sense. No villain is revealed to be a stand-in for a system. The closest thing to a sermon arrives when Troy is advised to seize his opportunities, and that advice comes from a basketball coach, which should tell you where the film's moral sympathies lie. The result is a tight, agreeable piece of summer entertainment with good songs and a tan. We grade it accordingly, and we do so without complaint.