The Secret Life of Pets 2

I watched The Secret Life of Pets 2 while nursing a mild caffeine headache and picking the remains of a dangerously crunchy granola bar out of my molars, and honestly, that’s the ideal state for this movie. It’s a film that doesn’t demand your total intellectual surrender, but it does ask—very politely—if you’d like to see a rabbit in a superhero costume for eighty-six minutes.

Released in the titan-year of 2019, right when the MCU was sucking all the oxygen out of the room with Endgame, this sequel feels like a fascinating artifact of the "Illumination Era." While Disney and Pixar were busy trying to make us cry over sentient trash or existential dread, Chris Meledandri and his team at Illumination were perfecting the art of the high-floor, low-ceiling blockbuster. They make movies that look like candy, move like a caffeinated ferret, and cost about half as much as the competition to produce.

A Narrative Three-Ring Circus

The first thing I noticed—and it’s hard to miss—is that this isn't really one movie. It’s three separate short films that have been aggressively stapled together in the third act. In one corner, we have Max (now voiced by Patton Oswalt, replacing Louis C.K. in a move that reflects the industry's rapid post-2017 course corrections) dealing with the arrival of a human baby. In another, Snowball (the eternally loud Kevin Hart) is playing superhero with a new dog named Daisy (Tiffany Haddish). And in the weirdest subplot, Gidget (Jenny Slate) has to go undercover as a cat to retrieve a lost toy.

It’s a lot. But in our current era of short-attention-span cinema, it kind of works. I found myself gravitating toward the Max storyline, mostly because it takes him out of the generic New York City streets and drops him into the countryside. This is where the "Adventure" genre tags really kick in. There’s something genuinely charming about a neurotic city dog encountering a turkey that looks like it wants to commit a felony.

The standout, of course, is Rooster. Voiced by Harrison Ford in his first-ever animated role, Rooster is essentially every character Harrison Ford has played since 1997: a man who is very tired of your nonsense but will ultimately help you save the day. The chemistry—if you can call it that in a recording booth—between Oswalt’s jittery energy and Ford’s tectonic rumble is the film’s emotional anchor.

The $400 Million Side-Hustle

From a "Popcornizer" business perspective, this film is a case study in how to handle a sequel. The first Secret Life of Pets was a monster, raking in over $875 million. By the time 2019 rolled around, "franchise fatigue" was the buzzword of the week. While the sequel "only" cleared $429 million—a massive drop-off by some metrics—it was produced for a relatively lean $80 million. In an era where Disney was routinely spending $200 million on movies that sometimes struggled to find an audience, Illumination’s efficiency is staggering.

Chris Renaud (the guy behind Despicable Me) knows exactly how to pace these things. The animation is vibrant, utilizing a "squash and stretch" style that feels more like old-school Looney Tunes than the hyper-realistic fur rendering we see from other studios. I’ve always appreciated that about this series; it doesn't want to look like real life. It wants to look like the inside of a child's toy box.

The movie is essentially three YouTube skits in a trench coat, but those skits are remarkably well-executed. Whether it’s Lake Bell’s Chloe teaching Gidget how to act like a cat (Rule #1: Eat the bird), or the sheer absurdity of a circus wolf being the primary antagonist, the film never slows down long enough for you to realize how thin the plot actually is.

Stuff You Didn't Notice

One of the more interesting behind-the-scenes wrinkles is the casting of Tiffany Haddish. In 2019, she was everywhere, and her inclusion here as Daisy was a blatant (and successful) attempt to inject some fresh energy into a cast that already felt a bit settled.

Also, keep an ear out for the score by Alexandre Desplat. It’s easy to ignore the music in these big-budget bright fests, but Desplat (who did The Shape of Water and The Grand Budapest Hotel) brings a jazzy, Gershwin-esque vibe to the New York scenes that gives the film more "prestige" than it probably deserves. It’s that weird mix of high-art talent and low-brow slapstick that defines modern blockbuster animation.

Is it a masterpiece? No. But it’s a film that understands the 2019 audience’s need for "comfort viewing." It’s a movie that says, "I know the world is a bit much right now, so here is a cat high on catnip for five minutes." Sometimes, that’s all I really want from a trip to the cinema.

Ultimately, The Secret Life of Pets 2 is a perfectly functional piece of entertainment that manages to outshine its predecessor by actually giving its characters something to do. It trades the "Toy Story" clones of the first film for a more frantic, segmented adventure that feels right at home in our current streaming-and-short-form landscape. It won't change your life, but it might make you look at your dog’s neuroses with a bit more affection. If you have eighty-six minutes to kill, you could certainly do a lot worse than watching Harrison Ford tell a cartoon dog to stop acting like a coward.