Kyle Smith: 'Things Take a Turn For the Gay' in 'Happy Feet Two'

Happy Feet penguins

Kyle Smith:

Perplexingly, things take a turn for the gay: Damon’s krill says he wants to raise kids together, at which point Pitt’s notes that they’re both males, yet Damon thinks this is no big deal and (I’m not making this up) starts suggestively singing a Wham! song, which causes Pitt (not unreasonably) to dump Damon. I’ve got nothing against alternative-lifestyle krill, but what are they doing in my dancing-penguin movie?

But that’s not all:

The “aliens” (humans) are enemy polluters, then friends, then enemies (the penguins panic when they spot the humans roasting their fellow birds the chickens), then friends again — an alliance sealed when the rockhopper penguin Lovelace (Robin Williams) plays them an air-guitar solo from “We Are the Champions.” The humans respond in kind, and the fraught interplay of man and nature turns into “Bill & Ted’s Wild Kingdom.”


That isn’t even the leading “Huh?” moment. Repeatedly and tiresomely, we cut away from these tangents within tangents to go completely off-topic for updates on a quarrelsome pair of krill (Matt Damon, Brad Pitt) who speak in witless wordplay and rhymes. They’re named Will and Bill the Krill. Their lines go like this: “There’s no such thing as free, Will,” “Goodbye, krill world” and “One in a krillion.” Their drill is nil and made me ill.

Smith has much more here in a separate essay

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