Betty Thomas’s sequel is a high-school comedy sung at a pitch only dogs and eight-year-olds can bear. David Cross works hard and the chipmunks sit convincingly in the frame, and nothing else here was made for anyone over ten.
Betty Thomas’s sequel gets Dave Seville (Jason Lee) out of the way inside ten minutes. A concert in Paris goes wrong, Alvin is to blame, and Dave is carried off on a stretcher, leaving three chipmunks in the care of his cousin Toby (Zachary Levi), a grown man who lives in his grandmother’s house and plays video games. Jon Vitti, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger have written a high-school comedy around this, with a battle of the bands to save the music department and a rival girl group, the Chipettes, managed by the disgraced Ian Hawke (David Cross). It runs 89 minutes and holds a U certificate, and it is made for children who will be under ten when they see it.
For those children, it will do. For anyone sitting beside them it is a long hour and a half of pitch-shifted singing, corridor jokes and a plot assembled from other, better high-school films. We do not say that in anger. The film is not cynical in the way the worst of these are; it is simply incurious, and it has no idea what to do with a grown-up.
What works is mostly David Cross. Ian has lost everything since the first film and lives in the basement of his old record label, and Cross plays him as a man who has decided that dignity was never going to be an option. He sells a line, he sells a pratfall, and he is the only performer here who seems to have read the script and chosen to enjoy it. Zachary Levi is likeable and under-used; Jason Lee spends most of the running time in a hospital bed and phones in, literally. The compositing is also good. Anthony B. Richmond lights everything flat and bright, like a daytime sitcom, which gives the animators nowhere to hide, and the chipmunks still sit in hands and on shoulders with weight and shadow. When Theodore (Jesse McCartney) climbs into Toby’s bed because he misses Dave, the fur catches the lamp and for a moment the film is tender.
Then someone presses play. By the fourth song we had a headache, and we noticed we had started counting them, which is never a good sign in a comedy. The problem is not the pop songs themselves but the voices, sped up until Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler, Jesse McCartney, Amy Poehler, Anna Faris and Christina Applegate are indistinguishable from one another and from a smoke alarm. Faris gives Jeanette a shy, swallowed delivery that survives the processing, and Applegate’s Brittany has some bite; the rest are lost. David Newman’s score barely gets a look in, and Matt Friedman cuts the numbers into two-second fragments as if he, too, wanted them over.
The script is the other trouble. Alvin (Justin Long) joins the football team, neglects his brothers and must learn a lesson, and it is the lesson every film of this kind has taught since the 1980s. Marcia Hinds’s school is a run of beige corridors that could be in any film, and is. Alexandra Welker dresses the Chipettes in short skirts and small heels, and we found that an odd choice for cartoon rodents in a U certificate, though we accept the seven-year-olds will not notice. Wendie Malick’s principal, Dr. Rubin, is a fan of the band and says so, which is the film’s one joke about itself.
Thomas made The Brady Bunch Movie, which knew exactly how silly its source was and said so. There is none of that here. The first film, from 2007, had the small advantage of novelty; this one has three more chipmunks and nothing else new, and most critics have said as much. We are a little kinder than the harshest of them because the compositing is real work and because Cross is funny, but not much kinder.
If you have a child who liked the first one, they will like this one, and you can let them. Sit in the next room with the door shut. The sound carries, but less.
