I keep renting movies from Screenselect, where I will simply add pretty much any movie to my want list if I haven’t yet seen it, wondering “why the heck did I have to add that to my list?”, and then finding I’m pleasantly surprised. At only 75 minutes length, Stuart Little 2 barely passes for a feature film, its story is nowhere near as full as the first movie (Stuart rescues a little bird who turns out to be a con-falcon’s moll intent on robbing Stu’s parents Geena Davis and Hugh Lawrie – more like a TV episode, really…), but in the end I found myself laughing out loud in more than a few different places.

Nathan Lane’s Snowbell has all the best lines, naturally (“But the good news is… I no longer need a litter tray,” and to the little bird, who’s hiding from her boss in a paintcan, “Where are you?” “I’m in the can!” “Oh.. I’ll wait.”) but there are great lines elsewhere, (Geena Davis (at Stuart’s little sports car found trashed in a New York street: “Who would do such a thing?” Hugh Lawrie: “Tiny, little vandals…”)

The effects aren’t much beyond the level of the first movie, but how can you really improve there, they worked to start with so, wisely, they haven’t been messed with. Stuart looks better than the other animal characters, I think – the falcon and the bird have different textures which don’t work as well as Stuart’s fur, but there’s a wealth of other invisible digital stuff in this movie that’s discussed on the DVD commentary, and I was pretty amazed by how much I hadn’t noticed.

Like I said, it’s 75 minutes long, so it whizzes by however you feel about it. So there’s not much to lose in giving it a try and you might, like me, be pleasantly surprised.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2004 at 12:29 pm in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.