For a film I mostly went to hate watch because Wife needed my monster and me out of the house while she packed for two hours, this wasn’t the worst movie of the year. Thinking about Trolls movies more as vehicles for famous pretty people to sing parodies of pop songs is probably a better way to orient yourself than to imagine it’s an actual movie. That was my mistake when taking the monster to maybe her second film in theaters ever this past summer, Trolls: World Tour. The monster was into all the musical numbers, but I walked away with a lot of questions, like, why does everyone blame Rachel Bloom’s Barb for the destruction of the magical strings when it is clearly and in every way the fault of Poppy and Branch? Like, at the end of the movie in front of a stadium full of troll folk, those two tear apart the strings before Barb can play a power chord and then to her face they’re like YOU CANNOT DESTROY THE MUSIC THAT LIVES IN OUR HEARTS. I also was a little bit confused by how Barb doesn’t really need to pay restitution for murdering all of the people who live in any of the musical lands?
Symphonyville looks pretty fucked up whent hey get there and even if all of the trolls got evacuated, there’s a lot of non-troll life that looks like it was injured or disfigured. Poppy’s forest home gets destroyed, if memory serves, but at the end, everyone’s just so relieved that Barb is willing to give up her designs on world domination that they really want to integrate her into the community of nations again without too much fuss. Is this how conservatives feel about Cuba? I wasn’t exactly upset and I haven’t really been shouting reparations during the trailer for this movie, but it does kind of stick in the back of your head.
While we’re talking about what works and doesn’t work in Trolls movies, I should just mention that I have never seen the original Trolls movie, actually. I do think that the movies have some amazing gags in them, like this gem of a moment about the inappropriately fast affection that Poppy is willing to furnish Barb with in World Tour.
But also the headfake in the form of Sam Rockwell’s character Hickory. Just some completely amazing cameos, celebrity casting decisions, and then the occasionally excellent twist, packed into a movie that is visually stunning, a world entirely crafted from shit you find at Michael’s down to the fake beads of water in the ocean.
In Band Together, the trailer makes it fairly explicit that this is going to a movie of small stakes, long lost siblings reunite and feelings are had. It mostly leans into the trope of second sequel shoe-horning family ties in order to up the emotional ante and tries to push the gag into the absurdist territory by including an extra sibling or two and some self-aware commentary on it. The cat hustle bus has more jokes in it than may appear from the trailer, and there’s some Hickory-like twistiness to the new characters we meet, but for the most part, Amy Schumer and Andrew Rannells are fabulous as the shallow, casually cruel baddies–and amazingly named–Velvet and Veneer, sucking the talent out of old performers in order to advance their careers. The standout character for me in this movie is Zosia Mamet’s Crimp, a sentient mop of crinkly paper who serves as Velvet and Veneer’s personal assistant and takes some pretty savage insults in stride. In a theater that had approximately six people in it months after the opening weekend, I found myself laughing out loud to nearly every line directed at her, despite the fact that she spends the majority of her time on screen locked behind a closet. Zoey Deschanel plays quite possibly her horniest character in Bridget, a–I want to say Bergen? Birkin?–a big monster who maybe was in the first movie eating trolls, but might also just be a cool friend of Poppy, not really sure.
Because the Troll movies have literally no internal logic and the plot makes no sense, it really feels like the only limit on how many there are is the length of time it takes to force a bunch of college students to render the graphics. Even so, I think I would watch a supercut of all of the scenes on Mount Rageous as many times as you let me.
