All over the place

Rating: 6/10 (2 February 2015)

First, the positive things: the animation is beautiful with excellent character designs and big improvements in lighting effects. I like the way the young characters now look more mature and bad-ass. The voice acting, just like in the first movie, is great. I especially enjoyed Jay Baruchel and America Ferrera's voices.
Now comes the bad parts. The story is just all over the place. It contains two main plot lines that have little to do with each other, and the movie spends the whole first hour jumping back and forth between them, trying to connect them and establish the plot but still fails to explore any of them thoroughly. Every event happens too fast and too suddenly that viewers just don't have time to truly feel any impacts they have. The characters, especially the new ones, seriously lack real emotions and convincing motivations. Any emotions that they do have, just simply don't last long enough as they usually get interrupted by the terrible pace. As the result, everything feels really forced, vague, and frustrating.
The jokes are also awful. They get repeated a lot and most are either too childish or just lame.
Overall, 'How to Train Your Dragon 2' is not a bad movie. It's actually quite entertaining thanks to the action and the great visuals, but still pretty messy and underwhelming, especially compared to the first one. I read somewhere that the script for this movie is in fact a combination of two planned sequels, so that's probably the reason for its weird plot.