This movie will most probably, for me, go down as one of the most disappointing movie of 2014. Not to say it's a bad movie, but it was just disappointing as it didn't live up to how great the first one was.
What's different in this sequel? Right off the bat and on the surface, you will notice Dean DeBlois has taken over completely the directing and writing roles; as compared to the original where he had extra pairs of eyes and hands helping him. And unfortunately, that's where things didn't go so well for me this time.
The concept for this sequel was still a great one. The characters have all grown in the four years that we didn't see them. The dragons too have grown. And now Hiccup has different sets of problems to deal with.
Without going into spoilers just yet, I didn't enjoy the pacing and story progression. In the middle was a slow crawl, to the point where there wasn't any intensity when there should be some urgency.
But the CGI was still beautiful. The dragons still looked awesome. And I'm sure kids will enjoy this immensely. But for adults, some of the jokes fall flat. And the whole middle section had trouble keeping my attention.
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Spoiler ranting section. Be warned.
In the trailer we saw that this was where we will discover who Hiccup's mother was. While I can accept the building of the relationship between them, but then Hiccup's father came into the picture and there was this whole section of them being a family. That's when things really slowed down and the pacing went off.
There were also a lot of cringing for me as I watched the romance blossomed (once again) between Hiccup's parents. The movie hit its lowest point when they started singing. Not that I don't appreciate a good song but there just wasn't any urgency anymore once that happened. They were supposed to be dealing with the antagonist, Drago, or preparing for Drago's imminent arrival and yet they were preparing sushi.
And although the Alphas looked amazing, but they were very inconsistently used. In one scene they were menacing and breathing ice, and then in another we saw how the much smaller dragons' fire breath can cause the Alpha pain.
It's also very weird how some dragons were "hypnotised" while others weren't. Or how Toothless suddenly became immune to the ice breaths. Or how in the world did Hiccup know that blindfolding Toothless will keep him from being "hypnotised"?
There's one scene when Hiccup exclaimed that Toothless cannot fly on his own. Meaning that somebody needs to know how to work his tail in order to fly Toothless. So once Drago climbed on to Toothless, somehow he immediately knew how to work the tail?
And my biggest problem with this movie was that it was never explained to us how Drago could control an Alpha of his own or where he found that Alpha. Why would Drago need the dragon hunters when he essentially can control dragons?
There were too many lazy writing in this one that those four years spent preparing this movie has really gone down the drain. Dreamworks dropped the ball on this one.
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