How to Train Your Dragon 2 is a great follow-up to the first movie, but its awesomeness is marred by two main disappointments: prejudice in the portrayal of the bad guy, and a complete undoing of the pacifist messages of the first movie.
SPOILERS AHEAD - Watch the movie before proceeding! You have been warned!
World-Building: Awesome
Characterization: Fail, especially with the bad guys
Plot: fast-paced
How to Train Your Dragon 1 was about the young viking boy Hiccup discovering that there's another way for his war-like people to live. A better way that didn't involve killing dragons. He discovered that humans and dragons could in indeed coexist. It was a great movie that showed change was possible, that showed we should listen to those voices calling out for peace. This movie... it's difficult to figure out what it was trying to say, other than maybe "Stoik was right all-along you can't reason with "evil people". This is disappointing.
As soon as the bad guy stepped on the screen the racist undertones were unbearable. He had been wrapped in shadow at the start and his dark cloak kind of obscured him, but when we see him in person he's dark, he had dreadlocks, and he has an accent. Not a Scottish or British accent like some of the good guys in the movie, no, this one's the thick accent of a non-native English speaker. It was quite disappointing.
The bigger disappointment for me, however, was that in the end Hiccup turned out to be wrong. He couldn't reason with Drago who turned out to be a one-dimensional bad guy bent on controlling everything just for the sake of controlling everything. This dark "other" bad-guy had to be defeated by force. I held out hope that maybe Hiccup would somehow manage to get through to the Alpha dragon that Drago was using to control all the other dragons. For a few seconds it looked like this was going to happen. Not so. Hicup had to defeat the Alpha by cutting off it's tusk and scaring it off in a show of strength.
The only message that came through loud and clear in this movie is that some people are just plain evil and can't be reasoned with, they have to be defeated by force. That those naysayers who say peace is impossible are actually right after all. Disappointing.
If you can grit your teeth and ignore or put up with all of this the movie itself was fast-paced and contained some pretty cool flying scenes and the mother-son tale was touching.
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