Trolls Band Together – NSYNC fandom rise up!

For those who have been pining with frantic excitement for the prospect of an NSYNC reunion, then Trolls Band Together is the movie for you. It is the second sequel in the staggeringly popular Trolls-based animated musical saga, and lest we forget, the first sequel, Trolls World Tour, became something of a film history benchmark as an example of a gigantic earner released directly to streaming during the Covid pandemic.

This new one makes for more of the happy, clappy same, offering a light commentary on the state of ephemeral pop music and the need for artists to retain a sense of individuality. It’ll be interesting to see if a renewed gusto for “The Cinema Experience” causes this new one to make even more cash and disprove the naysayers who, back then, were using World Tour as a case study to fire up the bulldozers and flatten every multiplex in town. I guess we’ll see…

This new one sees chatterbox Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and sensitive Branch (Justin Timberlake) headed on a – you guessed it! – ad hoc road trip to reassemble the members of the latter’s old boy band Brozone, so named because all its members were, in fact, siblings. Branch was a mere babe when he was part of the act that split acrimoniously and left him in the care of his gambling-addict grandmother.

It’s a fairly standard-issue sequel which pads out its thin-to-invisible storyline with a number of self-consciously garish animated interludes all in varying styles. At times the film barely stops to take stock of its characters in favour of winding montages and snappily edited musical breaks, so it’s hard to really invest in any of what’s happening here, especially the climactic reunion of the aforementioned late-’90s pop musical sensations.

One thing that’s very strange about the film, considering Timberlake is the main lead, is that they opt not to have him search for characters played by his erstwhile cohorts in NSYNC – the band all just kind of turn up randomly at the end to blast out their new heavy-rotation earworm and exit stage left. Yet the Trolls’ fight against the creatively rendered plastic pop sensations Velvet (Amy Schumer) and Veneer (Andrew Rannells), who are sapping their singing skills from them with a cruel new invention.

For people over, say, age ten, it’s slim pickings when it comes to laughs, emotion, drama and images that might lodge in your memory for more than a minute. And yet, it’s never overly egregious, whips along at a rate of knots and the credits are rolling just before any sense of malaise sets in.