Arrived at the O2 at around 2.15pm to a lot of chaos going on courtesy of some church thingy in front of the Superscreen balcony. Encountered a nervous bloke who had his entire family coming but none of them were there yet. After establishing that he wasn't a threat to our favourite seats, I promised to help him keep seats for them. By 2.30pm there was a queue. By 3pm it snaked round the block. We had to shift to one side because the church people were dismantling and hauling a lot of props around. The two Sky girls greeted us like long-lost friends (do we really go that often?). When we were let in, the balcony filled up in seconds. The lights which had been on were suddenly switched off so I had to go out and ask someone to switch them on again so I could read my book. One woman had a go at the Sky girl for one thing or the other, holding everyone up. It prompted a serious looking usher to go round counting empty seats and showing them to people. He was still at it after 4pm, when we got some overspill from downstairs. Despite that, the seat next to me stayed empty until finally at 4.20pm a bloke came and sat down so heavily that he nearly catapulted me out of my seat. A child kept crying and it took forever for the Dad to finally take it out of the cinema to calm it down. The film only started at 4.15pm. We were told not to leave after the film if we wanted to see a 20 minute episode of something called Yonderland.
Kids kept talking throughout the film. Adults who didn't want to be there kept tapping away on their mobiles. My neighbour kept shaking me by changing position every 5 minutes.
Despite this, I did enjoy the film. But boy, did it make me hungry. The film started a bit slow and we got a recap of what had happened in the first film. The fun finally started when the gang encountered the living food - the fruit, veg and meat creations were seriously cute, and there were many laugh-out loud moments. However, I thought it was sensory overload, too many multi-coloured creatures walking in and out of the screen, whereas some of the human characters got next to nothing to do. The doctor was reduced to filming on his video camera (he probably uttered three words during the film), and the policeman and the big baby were both quite cringeworthy. Steve the monkey was very funny, but then, he's an animal. The film isn't as good as the first one though it tries very hard and has some good ideas. It's not something I am longing to see again straight away.
We stuck around for Yonderland and so got to see all the credits which were quite funny (there's a scene at the end where Steve and Barb agree on a date). Yonderland was quite boring though so we finally left, straight out into the chaos that is the O2 when there is a concert on - millions of people clogging up all the food places so we had to go a bit further to get rid of our film-induced food cravings.
7/10
"There's a leek in my boat!"
8.5/10
We sat just in front of Teddybear1 and Deb1
