Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2

Watching Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 is comparable to eating stale leftovers from a once-delightful meal. Occasionally, there’s a pleasant reminder of the previous dinner, but all the flavor and freshness is gone.

Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the minds behind How I Met Your Mother and the big-screen 21 Jump Street as well as the previous Meatballs film, apparently had better things to do, and it shows. The first movie was a remarkable achievement considering that the children’s book by Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett had almost nothing in the way of story or character. Lord and Miller had to take some of the book’s images and build an animated story of their own.

This time around the writing has been outsourced to John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, the team behind The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. Their storyline, like that of the book, is thin to the point of anorexia. Even some of the youngest viewers in the crowd may find themselves figuring out what’s going on before the characters do.

At least Daley and Goldstein realize they can’t recycle the plot of the previous movie. After the bumbling but well-meaning inventor Flint Lockwood (voiced by BillHader) shuts down his satellite that turns his small town’s weather into tasty dishes, the young man’s childhood idol, Chester V (Will Forte), arrives with an offer Flint would seem foolish to reject.

Actually, the opposite is true. It seems the popular scientist and entrepreneur hasn’t relocated Flint’s entire small town to the Bay Area because he wants to maximize Flint’s ability to come up with strange, possibly useless inventions. Instead, Chester, who bears no small resemblance to the late Steve Jobs, wants to find a way to control the bizarre and rather cute creatures who dominate the area. Flint’s satellite used to turn precipitation into meals.Now, it has created a series of creatures that run rampant on the island. These include giant green onions that walk and move like dinosaurs and hippos with bodies made out of potatoes.

These food-imals are rather cute, but they really don’t have enough personality to carry the movie. As a result many of the returning characters are pushed aside. Flint’s relationship with his dad (James Caan), his gal pal Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) and the town’s cop (Terry Crews, subbing for Mr. T) don’t really grow in this new installment.

It’s also odd that Neil Patrick Harris is credited simply for providing the electronic voice for a monkey named Steve. One wonders how well Harris was compensated for simply repeating that name over and over again. For that cash, he should sing, dance and make self-deprecating jokes, just as he does at the Emmys and the Tonys. Most of these folks are simply, uh, there. Chester’s villainy is so obvious that you wonder if the tots in the audience might be able to outfox him.

Kristen Schaal has some moments as an ape who serves as Chester’s beleaguered assistant, but she offers about the only change that’s an improvement from the previous movie. As with the previous entry, the 3-D effects are impressive, but they do little to energize the torpid storyline. Like Flint’s inventions, they look cool, but they don’t do anything worthwhile outside a laboratory setting.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 72 Cast: Voices of Bill Hader, Anna Faris, James Caan, Will Forte, Andy Samberg, Benjamin Bratt, Neil Patrick Harris, Terry Crews, Kristen Schaal Directors: Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn Rating: PG for mild rude humor Running time: 95 minutes