Mike Mitchell is the director studios ring when a sequel needs finishing, and he finishes it: brisk, bright, on time and on tone. What he has not yet done is make one of them his own.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in a Mike Mitchell film a villain changes shape. In The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019) it is a queen who walks off with the film; in Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024) it is Viola Davis's sorceress, the one new thing in a picture that otherwise hands us what we had before. It is a fair emblem for the man behind the camera. Mitchell's job, for most of two decades, has been to take a world somebody else built and make it move again without anyone noticing the join.
He did not start there. After shorts and television, including SpongeBob SquarePants, he made his feature debut with Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999), then the live-action family comedies Surviving Christmas (2004) and Sky High (2005), the latter the better received. In 2006 he joined DreamWorks Animation as a story artist on Shrek the Third and Kung Fu Panda, and by 2010 he was directing Shrek Forever After, a troubled sequel he turned round. Trolls (2016) built a musical franchise out of not very much. Then came the two films we have reviewed, both other people's franchises, one a job he inherited from another director.
What he is good at is plain in both. The films are fast, clean and of a piece with what came before; a child who loved the earlier entries will not feel cheated. The Lego Movie 2 is denser and better sung than the first, and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's script gives it a good idea to start from: the game on the basement table is now shared with a younger sister, and the two children do not agree on the rules. The last quarter of an hour moved us, and it moved us because the film finally stopped joking and looked at those two children. Before that are 107 minutes of jokes, most of them good and nearly all of them familiar.
That is the trouble. Kung Fu Panda 4 is quick, bright and cheerful, and we knew within half an hour that there was nothing underneath it; the feeling the earlier films kept under the slapstick has gone, and Mitchell has not put anything in its place. He told an interviewer, "If you’re doing a part two, it’s got to be twice as good, right? You can’t repeat gags." We admire the principle. Neither film we have seen lives up to it, and both are at their best when Lord and Miller, or Davis, hand him something new.
He is a safe pair of hands, and there is nothing wrong with that. The animators at DreamWorks plainly trust him, and the films arrive finished and on tone, which is rarer than it sounds. What we have not yet seen is a Mitchell film a viewer could name without the credits. The next one, on current form, will be a sequel someone else began. We would like it to be something he started himself.
Biography
Mike Mitchell is an American film director, writer, producer, actor and animator. Born on 18 October 1970 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, he studied at the California Institute of the Arts and began his career as a storyboard artist, working with filmmakers including Tim Burton and Spike Jonze.
He made his feature directorial debut with the comedy Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999). His subsequent credits include Sky High (2005), Shrek Forever After (2010), Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked (2011), The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015), Trolls (2016), The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019) and Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024).
