Rio 2 (2014)

Rio 2 arrives as the sort of sequel that mistakes volume for ambition, hauling Blu, Jewel, and their three hatchlings out of the comforts of Rio de Janeiro and into the Amazon, where a flock of blue macaws, a hostile tribe of scarlet macaws, and a gang of illegal loggers all compete for screen time. The film is busy. It is also, in its own modest way, an environmental tract, since the villains this time are not jewel thieves but timber operators led by a man named Big Boss, and the climactic set piece involves the assembled wildlife disabling heavy machinery. The forest is worth saving. The film says as much without raising its voice far above a samba beat.

The voice cast is a broad and genuinely international assembly, with Jamie Foxx, will.i.am, Bruno Mars, Andy Garcia, Rita Moreno, Tracy Morgan, Janelle Monae, and Amandla Stenberg filling out the ensemble. Much of this reflects the Brazilian and Amazonian setting instead of any casting directive, and the film never treats the makeup of its cast as a subject for comment. Jewel remains a determined lead who drives the family's return to the wild, though the screenplay stops well short of any argument about gender. The birds are birds. The story concerns habitat, fatherhood, and the difficulty of fitting in when your father-in-law is a stern patriarch with wings.

The ecological appeal lands softly, folded into musical numbers and slapstick, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum and the lecture energy low. There is a mild swipe at corporate resource extraction, since the loggers are framed as profit-driven despoilers, but the critique stops at the tree line and never widens into an argument about economic systems. We get a children's adventure with a conscience and a running time it does not entirely justify. Critics were mixed. Audiences were kinder. The parrot sings, the jungle survives, the machinery stops. There are worse outcomes, and few quieter messages.