The Angry Birds Movie 2 (2019)

The Angry Birds Movie 2 is the second cinematic outing for a franchise that began as a mobile game about fowl with anger issues, and it carries the modest burden of improving on its predecessor. It does. The birds and the pigs, long at war over eggs and pride, negotiate a truce to face a common enemy from Eagle Island. The voice cast has expanded into a genuinely multiracial ensemble, with Leslie Jones, Awkwafina, Sterling K. Brown, Tiffany Haddish, and Eugenio Derbez joining the returning players. New female characters, including the warlord Zeta and the engineer Silver, fill out what was once a male-heavy roster. None of this is announced. It simply occurs, which is the more graceful way to do it.

The film's progressive instincts are modest and largely external. Silver is a bright engineering student who out-thinks the heroes, and the studio marketed her as a role model for young women in science. Zeta, a female warlord, commands the antagonist role with genuine menace. The climate connection is thinner still: the frozen-world premise was leveraged in marketing to gesture at environmental urgency, though the plot itself concerns a lava cannon and nothing more. The central moral, that former enemies should unite against a shared threat, was noted by the filmmakers as apt for a polarized moment. It arrives with a light touch, more shrug than sermon.

What the film does not do is equally instructive. There is no romantic or identity content beyond a closing heterosexual pairing, no body-acceptance theme, and no critique of wealth or class. The humor rests on pratfalls and, repeatedly, on the exposed hindquarters of pigs. A viewer searching for social consciousness will find a mild truce parable and a competent STEM subplot, and little else. It is a pleasant, well-animated diversion that occasionally mistakes a casting decision for a statement. We have graded it accordingly, with the solemnity the task demands.