Producers: Yvett Merino and Christina Chen   Directors: David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand and Dana Ledoux Miller  Screenplay: Jared Bush, Dana Ledoux Miller, Bek Smith and Bryson Chun  Cast: Auli’I Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Temuera Morrison, Nicole Scherzinger, Rose Matafeo, Hualālai Chung, David Fane, Rachel House, Alan Tudyk, Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda, Awhimai Fraser, Tofiga Fepulea’I and Gerald Ramsey   Distributor: Walt Disney Studios

Grade: C

The animation is spectacular but the story and songs decidedly less so in this sequel to Disney’s blockbuster 2016 animated musical.  “Moana 2” continues the adventures of the intrepid island wayfinder (voiced by Auliʻi Cravalho) and her demigod pal Maui (Dwayne Johnson).

In the first film they’d cooperated—after initial antagonism, of course—in restoring the “heart” of her island, Motunui.  Now they rejoin forces to reunite the peoples of the various islands of Oceania, who’d been separated, we learn along with Moana early on, by a curse laid on Motufetu, the island that served as their unifying hub, by the god Nalo (Tofiga Fepulea’i).

With Motunui now restored to lushness and peaceful prosperity, Moana has been traveling into uncharted territory, seeking evidence about other sea people with her animal chums, the pig Pua and the chicken Hei (Alan Tudyk).  After she finds a cup with some foreign symbols on it, she learns from her spectral ancestors, including her beloved deceased grandmother Tala (Rachel House), of Nalo’s disruptive curse, and is inspired to try to end it.  Her parents Tui (Temuera Morrison) and Sina (Nicole Scherzinger) are apprehensive, and her younger sister Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda) distraught at the thought of her leaving, but Moana is determined.

This time, however, she will not go alone.  She recruits three islanders to accompany her, Pua and Hei: Loto (Rose Matafeo), a hyperactive young shipwright; Kele (David Fane), a cantankerous old farmer who will grow plants as food on the journey; and Moni (Hualālai Chung), an artist bard who also happens to idolize Maui.

He, however, is absent, having been captured by Matangi (Awhimai Fraser), who has imprisoned him dangling from his powerful fishhook in her dark realm, filled with her army of bats.  Though inserts occasionally return to his plight, it will not be until Moana and her cohorts free him some time into their voyage that he actually becomes part of the group, and even then reluctantly.

Before that happens Moana and the accompanying trio—who, it must be admitted, are more amusing in theory than in reality—encounter dangerous waters, since Nalo, whom we don’t actually see until a mid-closing credits scene, is a master of storms and angry seas, and of enormous sea monsters, most with the kid-pleasing habit of spewing out slime at every opportunity.  There’s also a large contingent of Kakamora, those coconut-bodied pirates carried over from the first film like stomach-thumping minions.            

They turn out to be allies this time around in a battle against a clam so huge that it’s initially taken to be an island.

Once egotistical Maui joins the mission, the film becomes a fairly obvious, if visually entrancing, effort to raise Motufetu from the bottom of the sea in the face of all the tempestuous rage Nalo can summon to stop them.  Their success is assured, of course, but watching it unfold leaves one feeling that it all seems formulaic, even with the eye-popping imagery fashioned by production designer Ian Gooding, animation director Byron Howard, animation heads Kevin Webb and Amy Lawson Smeed, and visual effects supervisors Carlos Cabral and Kyle Odermatt   Nor does the direction by David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand and Dana Ledoux Miller or the editing by Jeremy Milton and Michael Louis Hill manage to boost the energy level sufficiently, largely because the script cobbled together by Jared Bush, Miller, Bek Smith and Bryson Chun comes across as a labored attempt to copy the template of the first film, its juggling of action and humor more calculated than natural and the episodes clumsily linked together with little attention to the passage of time, though Kele’s presence alone would suggest that the voyage is as prolonged as that of Jason and the Argonauts.

While the background score by Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’I does its job efficiently enough, moreover, the songs by Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear don’t match the infectious quality of those in the previous movie.  The ones early on are pleasant enough, if hardly memorable, but they get worse as the film proceeds, with the worst being Maui’s intended show-stopper, “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?,” designed to bolster Moana’s spirits when she’s feeling low.  Any lyric that includes the repeated refrain “Come on-a, Moana!” deserved to be scuttled.  The number also proves that Johnson simply cannot sing.

Otherwise, though, he’s on target again, delivering the swagger and bravado at the character’s core, even when the script’s banter is feeble.  Cravalho has no difficulty handling the vocal pyrotechnics, and, as eight years ago, her perkiness is consistently engaging even when the lines she’s delivering are not, as in Moana’s syrupy scenes with Simea.  Among the rest the standout is undoubtedly Fraser, who gives Matangi a droll malevolence, and even carries off her less-than-stellar solo number, “Get Lost.”  The indication in that end-credits scene that she might play a major role in the inevitable sequel is not unwelcome.

One shouldn’t be too hard on “Moana 2.”  Yes, it suffers from the common affliction of sequelitis, falling short of its predecessor.  But the drop-off isn’t calamitous, and fans of the first film will probably find it mildly enjoyable, especially since the visuals are so entrancing, and the lessons it dishes out uplifting enough.  But if the series is to continue, it will need smarter writing and better songs in future installments.            

Producers: Todd Komarnicki, Emmanuel Kampouris, Camille Kampouris, Ralph Winter, Mark O’Sullivan, Chloe Kassis-Crowe and John Bennett Scanlon   Director: Todd Komarnicki   Screenplay: Todd Komarnicki   Cast: Jonas Dassler, August Diehl, David Jonsson, Flula Borg, Moritz Bleibtreu, Nadine Heidenreich, Greg Kolpakchi, William Robinson, Clarke Peters, Patrick Mölleken, James Flynn and Phileas Heyblom    Distributor: Angel Studios

Grade: C

It would be gratifying to write that Todd Komarnicki’s biographical film on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran minister who was such a committed opponent of Nazism that he was executed for involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, was worthy of him.  Unfortunately, it’s not.  “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin” is earnest and strenuously edifying, but also stolid, simplistic and chronologically fractured, not nearly as nuanced a portrait as its subject deserves.

The film begins with a prologue set in 1914, with young Dietrich (Phileas Heyblom) playing around the family’s country home with his older brother Walter (Patrick Mölleken).  But Walter is called away to serve in the German army during the Great War and is killed in battle, leaving the boy, along with his parents Karl (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Paula (Nadine Heidenreich) heartbroken.  It then moves rather quickly to show the 39-year old Lutheran pastor (Jonas Dassler) in a concentration camp awaiting execution by hanging only weeks before the German surrender will end World War II in Europe.

Reversing the temporal course, the narrative turns to the young man’s sojourn at New York’s Union Theological Seminary in 1930-31, during which he finds the official instruction laughable but is engaged by his introduction to African-American religion and culture by classmate Frank Fisher (David Jonsson), who takes him to a Harlem jazz club (where he melds his playing of a prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier into an ensemble performance) and to the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the emotional pull of the preaching of Adam Clayton Powell Sr. (Clarke Peters) makes the wide-eyed student aware of the sterility of traditional German practice.  Fisher also makes a naïve Bonhoeffer aware of the depths of racial prejudice in America, a lesson he takes back with him when he witnesses the rise of Nazi anti-Jewish policy.

That leads him to oppose the established hierarchy’s acquiescence to the nationalization of the German Lutheran Church, complete with lionization of Hitler in a rewritten Bible, after his return to Germany in the thirties.  The film depicts him as a leading voice in the formation of the dissident Confessing Church opposed to the officially sanctioned one, even agreeing to serve as rector of an underground seminary for it, where he meets the student, Eberhard Bethge (William Robinson), who will become not only a friend and confidant but, as an author, the keeper of his memory. 

It also shows his work in England not only in enlisting support for that effort, but in spreading word of the dangers posed by the regime.  This aspect of the script emphasizes Bonhoeffer’s relationship with fellow pastor Martin Niemöller (August Diehl), who initially argued that the Nazification of the church was a tolerable aberration but came to see it as an existential danger.  (For dramatic effect Komarnicki repurposes Niemöller’s famous postwar “First they came for” formulation to a sermon he preaches to his congregation, ruffling the feathers of soldiers in attendance.)

Hovering over all this earlier material is the reality of Bonhoeffer’s fate after he became involved in helping to spirit Jews across the border to Switzerland and contributing to the resistance movement within the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency, in which his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi (Flula Borg) was a major activist, and which culminated in several failed plots to kill Hitler.  The degree of his actual participation in these endeavors is a matter of debate—he certainly acted as a courier, but whether it went any further is unclear; Komarnicki certainly stretches speculation about his direct involvement as far as he can for dramatic purposes.

In the process, unfortunately, the writer-director fails to illustrate the complexity of Bonhoeffer’s Chistocentric view of the individual believer’s life and how it related to the tension he felt between his pacifism and activism in the face of evil; these are issues that as a philosopher-theologian Bonhoeffer grappled with to the very end, and the film deals with them only in a relatively superficial fashion, portraying his final decisions in a fairly obvious, even simplistic way.  Of course it’s asking a lot of a film to expect it to convey the intricacies in the internal debate of a man so committed to working through fundamental moral issues.  But while his external actions are hardly insignificant, the workings of his mind are what really make Bonhoeffer fascinating.

In that respect while it may be dramatically satisfying to watch Bonhoeffer interacting with a conflicted German officer (Greg Kolpakchi) in the camp where he’s executed, perhaps the most telling episode is actually his conversation with Sigmund Rascher (James Flynn), an SS doctor who’d engaged in experiments as heinous as Mengele’s but been arrested for insulting Hitler.  Their sparring, which pits the theologian desperate for certainty in his faith against the jabs of an amoral cynic, at least gets at the continuing struggle that marked Bonhoeffer’s life.

But if Komarnicki’s film falls short in conveying the richness of Bonhoeffer’s thought, it provides a depiction of his courage that many will find satisfying from a purely emotional perspective.  And if Dassler’s performance matches Komarnicki’s approach in its bluntness, and the other performances are solid without being outstanding, they all get by.  (A couple of caveats: Tim Hudson does one of the weakest impressions of Winston Churchill ever, and Marc Bessant’s Hitler is even worse: fortunately, both appear very briefly.)

 On the technical side, one has to admire the look the behind-the-camera team—production designer John Beard, costumer Chouchanne Abello-Tcherpachian, cinematographer John Mathieson—have achieved on what was probably a limited budget, and the score by Antonio Pinto and Gabriel Ferreira is suitably morose.  But Komarnicki’s pacing is ploddingly reverential, a quality exacerbated by Blu Murray’s slack editing.                                    

One must also note that the film has engendered controversy, with descendants of Bonhoeffer and scholars of his work criticizing it for presenting Bonhoeffer’s life in a fashion that has allowed it to be embraced by Christian nationalists and authoritarians.  Though taken on its own it doesn’t come across as polemical in that regard, some aspects of the advertising campaign and the fact that the distributor adopted its subtitle from the popular 2010 biography of Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, a strident right-wing political activist, can certainly be cited in support of the claim. 

Whether or not you view it as propagandistic in that respect, however, the film’s flaws from a purely cinematic perspective are serious enough that those wishing to learn about Bonhoeffer might do better to seek out Martin Doblmeier’s solid 2003 documentary on him instead.