Movie review: ‘Moana 2’ is a sea-plus musical
The Disney musical sequel “Moana 2” is, like David Lynch’s surreal adult masterpiece “Mulholland Drive” before it, a repurposing of material originally intended for the small screen.
The follow-up to the Dwayne Johnson-headlined hit was initially announced as a Disney+ streaming series before being retrofitted into a theatrical feature. Johnson, who reprises his quippy role as the vain, shape-shifting demigod Maui, is also starring in a live-action remake of “Moana” due in July 2026, less than a decade after the animated version arrived. Remember when Disney would wait a generation before giving blue-chip animated musicals like “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin” underwhelming, live-action reskins?
The target audience for “Moana 2” is not so well-versed in the history of remakes, of course. But their parents, older siblings or other chaperones may recognize the whiff of uninspired, ho-hum adequacy that permeates this amiable time-waster. It’s not just that “Moana 2” only fitfully recaptures the spark and novelty of its precursor. It’s that this sequel echoes so many other franchises that have in recent years been absorbed into the Disney monolith: “Avatar,” “Star Wars,” “Black Panther.”
Each of those so-called four-quadrant properties skews slightly older, and the extent to which “Moana 2” borrows from them both visually and thematically – yes, even when factoring in that all of these sagas are more or less extrapolated from the same monomythical source code – suggests it’s been engineered as a gateway drug into one or more of the other extended IP universes Disney controls. To quote the Rock’s immortal musical number from “Moana” … you’re welcome?
As a cinematic event, “Moana 2” is no more than a placeholder on the calendar between “Wicked,” a much stronger family-friendly musical, and Barry Jenkins’s prequel “Mufasa: The Lion King,” due out Dec. 20. The latter project is the one to which Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the most memorable “Moana” songs, decamped. The other composers and songwriters from “Moana,” Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i, have returned; replacing Miranda are the young songwriting duo of Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear.
The new songwriters are TikTokers who won a Grammy Award for “The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical.” They step into Miranda’s shoes capably, giving us another showcase for Johnson’s, um, spirited singing chops in “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?” The man-mountain can carry just about anything that isn’t a tune, but he’s game, and that counts for a lot. They also replicate the anthemic sweep of “How Far I’ll Go” from the original film with the new number “Beyond.” As a singer and actor, Auli’i Cravalho is just as convincing in the title role here as she was eight years ago. There’s also a fun, disco-fueled number called “Get Lost,” performed by Awhimai Fraser in the guise of Matangi – a new character of mysterious loyalties.
The songs aren’t the problem. Rather, it’s the muddled story, which takes way too long to give Moana – now a skilled wayfinder scouting new lands and new peoples to reconnect her long-isolated island tribe with the world – her mission. (Jared Bush, who wrote the screenplay for “Moana,” shares writing credit on the sequel with Dana Ledoux Miller, who co-directed with David Derrick Jr. and Jason Hand.) After a vision instructs Moana to seek out the hidden island of Motufetu, she recruits a crew: boatbuilder Loto (Rose Matafeo), overenthusiastic Maui fanboy Moni (Hualalai Chung) and grouchy old farmer Kele (David Fane). These new characters don’t get fleshed out as they might have in a series, but they’re good company. One of the coconut pirates from “Moana” joins up, too, and proves a capable warrior. Finally, Heihei, Moana’s dumb-even-by-poultry-standards pet chicken rooster, returns. It’s nice that Disney is once again paying the versatile comic actor Alan Tudyk to make bird noises.
The fact that Moana is now a sea captain responsible for others largely displaces the buddy-buddy dynamic she had with Maui in the first film and makes Maui more of a supporting player here. That’s fine; no one would argue Johnson has suffered from underexposure during the past eight years. And the most charming aspect of “Moana” – the mobile, evidently sentient tattoo on Maui’s chest that operates as his own Jiminy Cricket – is reprised to delightful effect. Unfortunately, that ink is the only part of the sequel that could be called indelible.