110 min | PG | December 22, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Buster Moon talks his way into the biggest stage of his life by promising a reclusive rock legend he has never met. The show must go on, even if the whole thing rests on a lie. Sing 2 is a jukebox musical that runs on charm and fumes.
Buster Moon runs a small theater and dreams of a bigger stage. He packs his troupe into a car and drives to Redshore City, a neon entertainment capital built on glitz and fear. To land an audition with media mogul Jimmy Crystal, Buster promises something he cannot deliver. He claims that reclusive rock legend Clay Calloway will headline the show. Sing 2 is a jukebox musical assembled around that lie, and the lie exists to justify a parade of licensed pop songs. The film moves fast because it cannot afford to let you notice how little holds it together.
Matthew McConaughey voices Buster as a koala built entirely from hustle. He sells every con with a salesman’s warmth that never cools. Reese Witherspoon plays Rosita, a pig whose fear of heights gives the climax its only real stakes. Scarlett Johansson plays Ash, a porcupine sent to coax Calloway out of grief, and she handles the quiet scenes with more patience than the script earns. Taron Egerton gives Johnny the gorilla a sweetness that survives a clumsy dance subplot, while Tori Kelly’s Meena carries the most genuine nerves as an elephant terrified of a love scene. Bobby Cannavale plays Jimmy Crystal with a wolf’s smiling menace, and Nick Kroll’s Gunter supplies the manic energy the writing keeps demanding.
Garth Jennings writes and directs, and his instinct is to fill every frame until momentum substitutes for feeling. The animation renders Redshore City in saturated light and chrome, a candy-colored Las Vegas that looks expensive and feels weightless. Jennings stages the musical numbers as relentless montage, cutting between performers so quickly that no single song gets room to land. The production design dwarfs the characters under giant sets and aerial rigs, which suits a story about spectacle swallowing art. The sound mix pushes the pop catalog to the front and lets the score serve as connective filler. The finale assembles a science-fiction stage production whose scale is the whole point and whose meaning is nowhere.
Sing 2 works as a delivery system for songs and color, and it knows exactly what it is. The problem is that every emotional beat arrives on schedule and resolves on schedule. Buster’s lie should cost him something. Instead it becomes another obstacle the plot clears on its way to the curtain. The film mistakes volume for joy and motion for stakes. It entertains while it plays and evaporates the moment it ends.