The Secret Life of Pets 2

Dir: Chris Renaud

2019

**

The Secret Life of Pets 2 is, much like The Secret Life of Pets, Toy Story but with animals instead of Toys. An unoriginal idea, but I don’t really care. The first film dealt with jealousy – a little dog called Max felt somewhat betrayed (which he was) when his owner brought home another dog called Duke. Much like Buzz and Woody, Max doesn’t really see himself as a dog and sees himself as favourite while Duke is an intruder who doesn’t fit in. They argue, get into a ridiculous scenario and eventually become friends. In the imaginatively titled The Secret Life of Pets 2, both dogs are in the same boat as their owner falls in love, gets married and has a baby. At first Max doesn’t warm to the baby as his quiet routine becomes disturbed, but after a while, once the baby is walking and talking, they bond with a mutual affection. Then comes the anxiety of parenthood. He starts scratching and ticking and is taken to the vets who sticks a cone of shame on him. A while later Max and Duke’s owners take the pair to the farm – which isn’t slang for putting them down, they actually go to a farm that is owned by their owner’s, husband’s uncle. There Max meets Rooster, a Welsh Sheepdog voiced by Harrison Ford, who takes him under his wing. Meanwhile, back at the apartment block where they live, Gidget – the little fluffy dog from downstairs who has a crush on Max – is panicked as she has lost max’s favourite toy that he entrusted her with. She eventually finds it in a cat-infested apartment below hers. A little old lady – cat lady – lives there with many, unhinged felines and Gidget finds the only way to infiltrate is to dress like a cat herself. A few apartments across lives Snowball, a bunny who thinks he’s a superhero. He is visited by Daisy who tells him a wild story about how she was traveling on a plane and witnessed a White tiger cub named Hu being mistreated and held captive by an abusive circus owner named Sergei. She asks for his hep to save Hu and he agrees. Gidget, who has somehow been declared queen of the cats, helps Snowball and Daisy rescue Hu. However, Sergei sends his black wolves to hunt and snatch Hu back. The gang stash Hu in Max’s apartment while they’re away but when Max and his family come home early they discover Hu. The black wolves find them, they take Hu, all the cats get in a car, they end up on a train, there’s a fight with a monkey….at this point I’d had enough. I watched the rest of the film but only technically. My eyes hurt and my brain became numb There was far too much going on at once and none of it seemed to have any point or logic to it. The film is for kids, I get that, but all the great animations of this ilk manage to appeal to all generations. This is not one of those films. I guess I have no problem with my young son watching such films but I’m not sure it is something he would have much enthusiasm for. I’m glad they replaced Louis ‘sex pest’ C.K. with Patton Oswalt as the voice of Max, and Harrison Ford’s first voice performance was, good, but apart from that the film made the muscle under my left eye twitch. The big tiger, the evil wolves, the cats driving a car and the circus train bored me. There was no real story here and it felt like this was a crazed first draft, written by someone late at night, high on caffeine, who hadn’t been asleep for three days. Someone with a tight deadline perhaps. What I wanted to know was how Max and Duke’s owner can afford such an apartment with amazing views of New York? She must be busy – probably too busy to have much spare time, which leads me to wonder why she thought it a good idea to have dogs. You can’t have dogs if you live in an apartment and are never at home, it’s cruel. How many bedrooms does this apartment have anyway, because the view is the same from each window? At first I wondered whether the film would be an important lesson to children about the effects of anxiety but apparently the solution is simply putting a cone around your neck. Treat the symptoms instead to curing the cause? Any vet would have doped Max with about as many expensive drugs as they possibly could. This should have been a film about a drugged up dog and his many hallucinations. Oh my God, maybe it is? It would explain a lot. I’m not sure what Harrison Ford’s Rooster really taught Max in the end but I was too annoyed at Max’s stupid owner for allowing him and Duke – city dogs – to sleep outside when the house they were staying at clearly had enough room for them. Max should consider himself lucky anyway. He was a few years old in the first film and in this film his owner meets a guy, marries him and has a kid. The story doesn’t actually begin until the kids is around three years old, two and a half at best, so Max is in pretty good health for his age. How Snowball is still alive is anyone’s guess, I guess he really is a superhero because he should be in a shoe box three feet under ground in central Park by now. Snowball is voiced by Kevin Hart, Kevin Hart is black, so of course Snowball has to rap at the end of the film, it’s a rule. The bad guy is also foreign, because foreign people are generally bad. The film is a mere shadow of the original. A disappointment all round but it does have less sex-pests than the first, which is something I guess.