the secret life of pets movie full movie

Jenny Slate and Lake Bell are always delightful, and the whole sequence where Chloe teaches Gidget how to be a cat would make any cat owner howl with laughter. Patton Oswalt makes Max his own, injecting an endearing, perpetual nervousness to a character who felt more like an everyman (everydog?) in the previous installment.

Gidget’s and Max’s storylines are straight out of a generic sitcom, and Snowball’s subplot is so danged ridiculous that it feels like it’s in the wrong movie. The new film coasts on tired plots and characters we’ve already met going about their business. As a result it was genuinely funny, pretty much from beginning to end. The original Secret Life of Pets made the most of an unexpected cast of characters, revealing unexpected fascinations and depths in each animal character. That would be fine if the movie was entertaining enough to get away with it.

Even then, the moral that “you can overcome a mental illness just by manning up” might not be the message every parent wants to impart to their kids. They don’t speak to a child’s experience nor do most of them have anything to teach children, except for Max’s storyline. The storylines serve little purpose other than providing fast-moving, brightly colored diversions for young kids.

The Secret Life of Pets 2 is very plucky and amiable, but it’s not much more than that. Now he thinks he’s a real superhero, and he gets enlisted by a dog named Daisy (Tiffany Haddish) to help her rescue a white tiger from the circus. There’s also Snowball (Kevin Hart), the angry bunny from the original, who has settled into a life of domesticity with a little girl who dresses him in superhero costumes. In order to get it out she’ll have to infiltrate the cat community, so she takes lessons in cat behavior from her neighbor Chloe (Lake Bell). Gidget (Jenny Slate), a spoiled fluffy dog with a crush on Max, loses Max’s favorite toy in the apartment of a crazy cat lady. That’s hardly enough plot to fill a half-hour animated episode, so The Secret Life of Pets 2 adds several other storylines about Max’s friends from the first movie.

The secret life of pets movie full movie