To be succinct, Rio was a film about some blue birds fucking about. It was so popular that we now have another film about some blue birds fucking about, except there are more and the whole plot was spoiled in the trailer hurray! Someday I’m going to start a website called ‘www.shouldIwatchthetrailer.com’ where I just tell people whether or not they should the trailer before they watch the actual film. Anyway, Rio 2 stars Jesse Eisenberg and other people’s voices and it’s ok.
Blu and Jewel, two cartoon birds, are living the life; their kids have iPods, pancakes and human being houses and everyone’s very happy. I haven’t seen the first Rio but I imagine it was a blue cartoon bird version of The Pursuit of Happyness. Now that they have everything they want, Blu’s wife decides she would like nothing more than to go on the Paleo diet, stop eating wheat and relying on human being instruments. Mere moments later their previous owners appear on TV, announcing that they think there are more blue cartoon birds living in the Amazon somewhere. Clearly Blu has been told that ‘a happy wife is a happy life’, so he willing uproots everyone to head to the Amazon. Obviously to the fact that doing everything your wife says is not the way to a happy life, but a good way to get her to cheat on you.
After making the move to the amazin’ Amazon they find Jewels dad who is an unrelenting, disapproving, male stereotype who hates anything new or exciting and refuses to associate with humans because humans are bastards that try and destroy forests. Some fucking dick called Roberto, another blue cartoon bird, enters the fray and starts throwing his big blue cartoon penis in Jewel’s face and she suddenly decides that Blu is not as cool as before, thinks they should live here and ignore all evidence of good humans trying to protect the Amazon.
So Rio 2 essentially boils down to good humans are trying to save the land, bad humans are trying to destroy it while blue cartoon birds get in a fight with red cartoon birds over their nuts and start to play football like Germany and Britain in the war. The outcome of which is lots of good things, a stereotypical ending and lots of cheering happy kids clapping away at bright colours and simple stories. The problem is, not all kids are morons, and some will prefer well-written versions of bright colours and simple stories like the first two Shrek films than this drivel. Why is that too much to ask?
No, instead kids get stuff like this.
On the bright side it wasn’t offensively bad at any point, it flowed quite quickly, the depressing Hollywood drop off in the middle of the film didn’t last that long and was over shadowed by cartoon birds playing quidditch. I was quite attracted to the poisonous cartoon frog for a while. But I think I’m going mad with a fever at the moment, which is very probable.
Blue and Red look nice when there’s green everywhere, 3/5.
[★★★☆☆]
Dave Roberts
Rio 2 at CeX
Get your daily CeX at
