So very, very meh.
Frozen 1 has all the hallmarks of a salvaged movie. You can see the cracks where it started as a disjointed mish-mash which didn't work, and then someone swooped in and saved the whole project. The end result is... decent-to-good. It bogs down a bit in places, and the love-interest going full-on mustache-twirling evil was silly, but the highs are so very good that it ends up feeling incredibly satisfying. Let It Go may be a bit overplayed, but it earned that overplay.
Frozen 2 is, quite clearly, unsalvaged. It's a whole bunch of random plot threads and nonsensical worldbuilding, buttressed by songs which are middling at best, and unmoored from the constraints of coherent plot. There's so much wrong with it, that I'd have to rewatch it to run it all down, and the thought of doing so makes me actively squirm. (fake edit: I ended up scrubbing through most of it anyway...) So, some highlights:
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Elsa's songs are crap -- two separate sequences grasping to reach the heights of Let It Go and failing miserably, buoyed only by the fact that Idina Menzel is doing her damnedest to hold them together.
Into the Unknown is the less-awful one. It starts strong, with solid verses, but then the chorus comes in, and it just belts out the same line over and over, to little effect. (For comparison, in its chorus, Let It Go manages to expound on the entire thesis statement of the movie.) And then, it fritters away the bridge on wordless vocalizations, and is abruptly truncated by the most unsatisfying lack of resolution imaginable. I'd swear it was an unfinished temp-track if Disney hadn't actually pressed it to CDs.
Overall, it's a meandering mess that wastes valuable time on fripperies, has no clear direction, and rushes to an unsatisfying conclusion. (So I guess it does contain the movie's thesis statement...)
Worse, however, is how -- during the aforementioned bridge -- they tried to have their big magical "Elsa builds her castle" moment... with the better part of a minute of knock-off Fantasia rejects in a featureless void. What The actual Fuck? What is happening here? Why? How? Where? For what purpose? Who's even doing half this shit? How does this tie into the metaphysics of the world? In Frozen, it was obvious what was happening -- Elsa built a castle and made a dress. Here, it's completely unmotivated nonsense.
This is the point I resigned myself to the fact that I was in for a slog, and that nobody was steering this ship.
Show Yourself is, again, very meh. It's more of the same as Into the Unknown, but it says even less.
On a literal, narrative level, it's almost entirely vacuous. As a self-empowerment message, it comes up woefully short next to Let It Go. For a very specific reading, for a very specific audience, with a very specific lived experience, it'll probably resonate. In the context of the movie, however, it says nothing and goes nowhere.
Musically, it's just a mess -- a weird mix of cliche and unstructured directionlessness, building to a befuddlingly nonsensical reprise of All Is Found (the only song in this whole mess I don't have angry words for) in the bridge. The instrumentals are so soulless I almost can't believe they aren't MIDI-synth placeholders.
The visuals are only vaguely less embarrassingly bad than Into the Unknown, if only because completely plot-disconnected bottle-episode ice cave is marginally better than featureless void of particle-system rendering tech-demos. The magic is, again, completely untethered from the world -- abstract symbology without causality. Except for where they tried to make it grandiose and concrete, and failed because the physicality has no weight or reason. Then they do the dress thing, so they can, once again, fail to recapture the Let It Go lightning-in-a-bottle, of course. Fuck this so very much.
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Other bits, in brief:
Kristoff's engagement arc is such a plot cul-de-sac... 10 minutes and 1.5 songs pissed away while the actual plot is a rushed mess. You're in the middle of an existential crisis, and you're wasting time on these trash-tier-anime level hijinks? Learn to read the room, fuckstick. Also, I've got no problem with inspiration, and all, but that direct rip of You're the Inspiration by Chicago is a bit on-the-nose, isn't it?
I like Olaf, and all, but he was such a pointless timesink. His only plot-relevant action was dying. If they'd left him behind in Arendelle and actually developed the plot, things would have been so much better. (And, they wouldn't have had to resort to deus-ex-machina fuckery to bring him back...) Obligatory song complaint: wow, this trite nursery-room trash is boring. At least In Summer was amusing. Billion dollar franchise, and this is the best you can do...
Elsa's self-discovery arc was a nothingburger. "Why am I like this?" "Because your Mom was like this." Cool. Yer a wizard, Elsa. I'm sure there's any number of weird readings that can be pulled out of it, but I'm getting tired of delving into this mess.
I guess Anna might have had an arc, but by the time it gets to the point of resolving, I'm too dead inside to be invested. There's a song, I guess? It wants me to feel something? Skipping though, it seems alright. I just can't bring myself to care.
The colonialism arc, where Disney makes a spiritual sequel to Pocahontas, and it's so much fucking worse. Hoo boy... Mining the plight of oppressed indigenous peoples for fun and profit -- but a nice, generic indigenous people that won't rile anyone up. Also, colonial oppression is just caused by the actions of one cartoonishly-evil asshole. (Never mind that a dam on that scale would take a pre-industrial town's worth of people a generation to build...) And the effects can, of course, be fixed by a single noble act with zero consequences, because more deus-ex-machina fuckery. (Thank god that Elsa inherited Momahontas' mojo...) I need to stop thinking about this, because I'm clearly putting more thought in than Disney's finest script doctors did, and it's just irritating me...
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The bit that probably pisses me off the most is that they literally released the best bits as trailers and everything else was a complete dumpster-fire. Like, that first teaser featuring the beach scene was, without a doubt in my mind, the best sequence in the movie. Then, the next couple trailers come out, and they look a little rote, but seem like they'll be a fun adventure romp anyway. And then, the movie drops, and it is such an abysmal disappointment. It's almost like they decided to make a sequel to their billion-dollar franchise and -- oops! -- forgot to write a script, so they had each scene lead make it up on the fly. This absolutely reminds me of the Tinkerbell series of movies -- a barely-coherent trainwreck interspersed with a few cute scenes.
Clearly, between this and Wreck-It Ralph 2, Disney's direct-to-video sequel garbage factory is alive and well, just with a bigger budget.
