Trolls Band Togeth­er – NSYNC fan­dom rise up!

For those who have been pin­ing with fran­tic excite­ment for the prospect of an NSYNC reunion, then Trolls Band Togeth­er is the movie for you. It is the sec­ond sequel in the stag­ger­ing­ly pop­u­lar Trolls-based ani­mat­ed musi­cal saga, and lest we for­get, the first sequel, Trolls World Tour, became some­thing of a film his­to­ry bench­mark as an exam­ple of a gigan­tic earn­er released direct­ly to stream­ing dur­ing the Covid pandemic.

This new one makes for more of the hap­py, clap­py same, offer­ing a light com­men­tary on the state of ephemer­al pop music and the need for artists to retain a sense of indi­vid­u­al­i­ty. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see if a renewed gus­to for ​“The Cin­e­ma Expe­ri­ence™” caus­es this new one to make even more cash and dis­prove the naysay­ers who, back then, were using World Tour as a case study to fire up the bull­doz­ers and flat­ten every mul­ti­plex in town. I guess we’ll see…

This new one sees chat­ter­box Pop­py (Anna Kendrick) and sen­si­tive Branch (Justin Tim­ber­lake) head­ed on a – you guessed it! – ad hoc road trip to reassem­ble the mem­bers of the latter’s old boy band Bro­zone, so named because all its mem­bers were, in fact, sib­lings. Branch was a mere babe when he was part of the act that split acri­mo­nious­ly and left him in the care of his gam­bling-addict grandmother.

It’s a fair­ly stan­dard-issue sequel which pads out its thin-to-invis­i­ble sto­ry­line with a num­ber of self-con­scious­ly gar­ish ani­mat­ed inter­ludes all in vary­ing styles. At times the film bare­ly stops to take stock of its char­ac­ters in favour of wind­ing mon­tages and snap­pi­ly edit­ed musi­cal breaks, so it’s hard to real­ly invest in any of what’s hap­pen­ing here, espe­cial­ly the cli­mac­tic reunion of the afore­men­tioned late-’90s pop musi­cal sensations.

One thing that’s very strange about the film, con­sid­er­ing Tim­ber­lake is the main lead, is that they opt not to have him search for char­ac­ters played by his erst­while cohorts in NSYNC – the band all just kind of turn up ran­dom­ly at the end to blast out their new heavy-rota­tion ear­worm and exit stage left. Yet the Trolls’ fight against the cre­ative­ly ren­dered plas­tic pop sen­sa­tions Vel­vet (Amy Schumer) and Veneer (Andrew Ran­nells), who are sap­ping their singing skills from them with a cru­el new invention.

For peo­ple over, say, age ten, it’s slim pick­ings when it comes to laughs, emo­tion, dra­ma and images that might lodge in your mem­o­ry for more than a minute. And yet, it’s nev­er over­ly egre­gious, whips along at a rate of knots and the cred­its are rolling just before any sense of malaise sets in.