Sing 2, review: a kid-friendly sequel that sticks to a well-worn, colourful tune

It’s been five years since the release of the animated film Sing, and the world is still waiting for someone to convincingly explain why Matthew McConaughey was playing a koala.

Don’t get me wrong: the actor’s syrupy-smooth Texan baritone is never less than a pleasure to listen to. But coming from the mouth of Buster Moon, a titchy, hyperactive theatre impresario of marsupial lineage, it just jarred – like settling down to watch Bambi, only to find the slender young fawn’s lines had been re-dubbed by Mr T.

Many other casting choices weren’t much more intuitive – Scarlett Johansson, in all her husky glory, voiced a punk-loving teenage porcupine – while the songs themselves were mostly threadbare pop-chart standards, seemingly thrown into the plot at random. If you’d been yearning to watch a frumpy sow played by Reese Witherspoon dancing around the supermarket to Bamboléo by the Gipsy Kings, here at last was your chance.

Millions took it. Worldwide, Sing made barely a sneeze less than Disney’s Moana, which was released the same year. So inevitably, here is a sequel by rote, in which all of the original film’s problems have been left almost stubbornly unsolved. Once again, Buster is putting on a show, though the aim this time isn’t to save his crumbling theatre from closure, but to crack Las Vegas – or rather Redshore City, a child-friendly desert resort standing in for the place.

His band of loveable amateurs are improbably promised a residency – on the condition they rope in the reclusive Clay Calloway, a long-retired lion rock star voiced by Bono, who Buster falsely passes off as an old show-business associate. As the group rehearse and attempt to coax Clay aboard, assorted sub-Muppets backstage antics ensue, interspersed with the usual be-yourself bromides. (On the Vegas stage? Good luck.)

Both Sing 2 and its predecessor were directed by Essex-born Garth Jennings, whose music videos in the 1990s and early 2000s for bands such as Radiohead, Blur and Supergrass, as well as his first two UK-based features, were crammed with personality and eccentric handmade touches. It’s depressing to be reminded again of how comprehensively the move to major studio animation can squash a filmmaker’s signature style, and no coincidence that Sing 2’s best scene – the one with British comedian and podcaster Adam Buxton as a fussy choreographer – contains a rare surviving trace of it. And as before, the song selection is obvious, arbitrary and broad to the point of tonal incoherence: Coldplay, Billie Eilish, Prince, Dionne Warwick, Ariana Grande, The Weeknd, and of course some U2 to bring down the curtain.

Yet it can’t be denied that as a piece of cover-all-bases, hi-sheen, lo-thought, built-to-order corporate product, the film runs with a steady and satisfying whirr. Sing 2’s animation is often technically astounding, and while it would be a push to describe any of its images as beautiful, there’s a garish splendour to the barrage of production numbers which comprise the opening-night climax. The timing is generally sharp too – there’s a terrific slapstick skit involving mops – and Buster’s iguana secretary Miss Crawly, voiced by Jennings himself, is enjoyably given freer rein as a dotty comic sidekick. For a younger audience, it works.

Near the start of the film comes a loaded moment, just after Buster fails to break into Vegas by conventional means. (The visiting talent scout, voiced by Chelsea Peretti, slinks out before the interval.) The poor, hard-working koala simply can’t understand it. His show is wildly popular, and the reviews quoted on the posters – “Super, silly fun!” “Your kids will love it!” – offer affectionate, if qualified, praise. Did Illumination Entertainment feel similarly hard done by when Sing was snubbed by the Oscars and the Baftas, and went largely uncelebrated by the industry at large? Anyway, their new one is super, silly fun. Your kids will love it.

U cert, 110 min. Dir: Garth Jennings. In cinemas from Friday