AC2: Random Movie Review - Trolls

So as most of you may know, one of the advantages of travelling on an A380 plane for several hours, is that you can watch a number of films in that time that you may have missed out on in its initial cinema run and the best part is that its for the most part all inclusive (otherwise known as free). So one of those films I watched was a DreamWorks film seeing as I haven't seen many in the past year or so and its based on the well known series of Danish Troll dolls. But what's clever about this film is that as the toy series didn't have a running story attached, they decided to do their own original story. Most films based on an otherwise storyless brand have had a pretty mixed reception with the likes of Garbage Pail Kids and Emoji Movie being considered as some of the worst films ever made whereas films like The LEGO Movie and the Toy Story films (which admittedly have a number of brands in it but not a focus on a specific brand) are widely regarded as some of the best. Then of course there is the thing about this film featuring numerous covers of pop songs and as long as it doesn't go the way of Alvin and the Chipmunks, we'll be just fine. So let's dive in:

So the film takes us to this world where we meet two different families of creatures. There's the Bergens who are dark, large and mostly miserable creatures. And then there are the titular Trolls who are largely very happy and love to sing, dance and hug while bringing some positive vibes into the world. The Bergens come to the conclusion that by eating one of these Trolls, they can find happiness. But when they succeed in capturing some Trolls after one of them became too noisy, one Troll named Poppy (played by Anna Kendrick, otherwise known as the leader in Pitch Perfect and Scott Pilgrim's sister) sets out to save the Trolls and bring an end to this tradition once and for all, believing that happiness can be given another way.

I will admit that when I saw it being advertised, I thought it would suck big time considering how the previously but similar films I mentioned had performed. But when I eventually came to watch it on my long flight on the A380, I thought it was a good film. A cover will be a cover and everyone knows that you can't beat the original versions of the songs, but the singing voices of Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake among others, actually sang it pretty well. It is very colourful as the posters and trailers make them out to be which makes some good visuals all around. The story does drop the pace a bit in the second half and there are parts where I felt that both creatures were a bit stupid, but otherwise its a good family film that children will enjoy, but also gives adults something to enjoy too which is good. 8/10