Frozen 2

No pity is extend­ed towards par­ents who have had to repeat­ed­ly sit through 2013’s Frozen with an excitable sprog or sprogs propped on their knee. Because at the end of the day, it’s a decent if unex­cep­tion­al ani­mat­ed runaround, buoyed by a nuclear-pow­ered show­tune banger and two inof­fen­sive­ly bland cen­tral char­ac­ters. It’s Dis­ney doing what they do best – deliv­er­ing uncon­tentious, aspi­ra­tional enter­tain­ment that smug­gles in soft-edged for­tune cook­ie wis­dom to be cheer­i­ly embraced by all.

The same can­not be said for the direc­tion­less bore that is Frozen 2, a belat­ed sequel that has absolute­ly no idea what it wants to be, what it wants to do, or what it has to say. Mes­sage to par­ents: buy in some fat cross­word puz­zle books, start a real­ly com­plex knit­ting pat­tern, or have ​‘Moby Dick’ ready and wait­ing on your e‑reader – any­thing to keep you occu­pied instead of hav­ing to re-endure the perky tedi­um of this severe­ly under­pow­ered girl’s own adven­ture that will no doubt be hearti­ly embraced the young and unquestioning.

The first big prob­lem here is that – a lit­tle like 2018’s Mary Pop­pins Returns – the cre­ative team have brought in the D‑list for song­writ­ing detail. Things start off slow, as you’d right­ly expect for the big num­bers to be stacked deep­er into the run time. Sad­ly, they nev­er arrive, with every song com­ing across like over-pro­duced, over-pol­ished album track filler with no hooks and no heart. One mas­sive­ly mis­guid­ed attempt at an iron­ic par­o­dy of ​’80s soft rock pow­er bal­lads falls flat as pas­tiche, and when tak­en at face value.

There is a noble attempt to rekin­dle the soar­ing ear­worm mag­ic of Frozen’s ​‘Let it Go’, but the sub­par ​‘Show Your­self’ sees quest­ing, ques­tion­ing queen Elsa doing the same tired old intro­spec­tive shuf­fle through a far­away ice palace, but with mas­sive­ly dimin­ished results. And as the show-stop­pers all fail to stop the show, one after the oth­er, it real­ly makes you won­der how much the suc­cess of the orig­i­nal film came from that sin­gle, spe­cial set piece.

Oth­er­wise, this is a case of hasti­ly reassem­bling the old team – Elsa (Idi­na Men­zel, Anna (Kris­ten Bell), Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), Olaf (Josh Gad) the wise­crack­ing snow­man and Sven the rein­deer – and pack­ing them off on a jour­ney to an ​“enchant­ed for­est” where a strange bat­tle was waged decades pre­vi­ous­ly. A lot goes on but noth­ing real­ly hap­pens, as the ​“thing” that the sis­ters are attempt­ing to fix is ill-defined and allu­sive. The only sur­pris­ing thing about this film is how com­plex and con­trived it is. It’s near­ly impos­si­ble to fol­low what’s hap­pen­ing, and what moti­vates the char­ac­ters to take action.

The pen­ny final­ly drops when we dis­cov­er that there isn’t real­ly any new mate­r­i­al here, and that the film exists sole­ly to fill in gaps from the beloved pre­vi­ous instal­ment. It real­ly has been pur­pose built for the star­ry-eyed lit­tle ones who have seen the first film 5,000 times and know every nuance by heart. It car­ries the same lack­lus­tre ener­gy of one of Disney’s direct-to-video sequels from times past: 1998’s Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride, or 1994’s The Return of Jafar.