Ben Lindbergh

And yeah, there was probably more exposition than you want in a moral combat movie.

You just kind of want them to fight.

Not that there wasn't fighting, but there was a lot of kind of laying the groundwork for the tournament.

Yeah, I still enjoyed it.

I thought it was sort of silly and fun and kind of over the top, maybe not enough over the top.

But I rewatched it this week, you know, just to refresh my memory on all the lore.

Same, same.

And I thought it held up.

It held my attention.

That's crazy.

But one thing we can agree on is that this movie is better.

This is an improvement on the original.

I just thought the bar was a bit higher from the original, which means I'm even more impressed by the sequel that it cleared it easily.

And really, it's been pretty warmly received on the whole, critically speaking.

That's good.

It's weird because the producer Todd Gardner went on this weird Twitter rant this week about how like all the critics are missing it and like you shouldn't be able to review this thing unless you love the genre and the franchise and you're missing all the lore drops and everything.

And it's odd because like the critical consensus has actually been pretty good.

It wasn't one of those, I mean, you know, you have the social embargo and then everyone says it's the best movie since Citizen Kane and then actual reviewers say, actually, this sucks.

But it's not, no, this movie has actually been, you know, like it, if you look at it on Rotten Tomatoes, at least as we record here on Thursday afternoon,

It's at 73%.