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In truth, the problems seem to emanate from the overall story in which the songs appear. Where “Moana” had a clear plot in which its eponymous leading lady embarked on a journey across the sea to save her people from starvation, “Moana 2” feels somewhat harried in putting together its new adventure, replete with new characters. The first “Moana” ended up being basically a two-hander for most of the plot, between Moana (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho) and Maui (Dwayne Johnson), along with the wordless dumb chicken Hei Hei, dangerous coconut people, and a giant, shiny crab. This time around, Moana is joined by an eager and chatty boat builder (Rose Matafeo), a grouchy old farmer (David Fane), and a fanboy of the entire Moana/Maui mythology (Hualālai Chung), and that’s before Maui even teams back up with his old friend. Once more, Moana has to venture out into the open sea, this time because she believes she’s found proof of other civilizations that had once been bridged by a mystical island/waystation in the middle of the ocean, lost due to the machinations of another terrifying god.
In the middle of the more plot-heavy and muddled storyline, you have the songs, a couple of which also can’t help but recall other recent sequel songs. For instance, when Moana belts out this film’s version of an “I Want”-style number, titled “Beyond,” it feels less like “How Far I’ll Go” and more like a tropical version of “Into the Unknown” from “Frozen II.”
But perhaps the biggest disappointment is the big Maui number, “Can I Get A Chee Hoo?” Considering how delightful and exuberant the “You’re Welcome” scene is in the first film, it’s no surprise that Johnson gets to belt out another song, once more visualized as if Maui and Moana are inside the visual design of the tattoos so heavily present on his large body. But where “You’re Welcome” was a fast, charming, well-written, catchy number that also spoke to the vanity of Maui as a character, “Can I Get A Chee Hoo?” is more in line with a bland buck-up-your-chin halftime speech delivered by a coach to his losing team to ensure they can win the big game in the second half. And in-lyric rhymes like “Come on-a, Moana” only serve to show that what Miranda brought to the table musically is nigh impossible to duplicate.
But that’s not for lack of trying. Each song in the film seems to function as the sequel version of what came before. “Get Lost,” performed by Awhimai Fraser as Matangi, an enigmatic lady who can take the form of a swarm of bats, is very much an attempt to ape “Shiny,” though just from the vantage point of kinda-sorta being the film’s villain song. (This is only “kinda-sorta” because Matangi is less villainous than Jemaine Clement’s crab from the original film.) Where “Shiny” was a deliberate riff on glam rock, “Get Lost” is just a speedy lyrical way to encourage Moana to look for new ways to find her path. Meanwhile, ensemble numbers like “We’re Back” and “What Could Be Better Than This?” just can’t measure up to the magic of the first film just without that one major ingredient that infused so much magic into the proceedings.
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