Actually, the director, Chris Mckay, did a phenomenal with the direction of the movie. The fast pace of the film does not come from lack of faith in the jokes it comes from inspiration from other films with that fast pace and energy.

Mckay specifically wanted to make LEGO Batman in a vein similar to films like “Airplane!” where there are like five jokes per minute and you might have to re watch the movie to catch all the jokes whether they be verbal or visual. Mckay was a director on several “Robot Chicken” episodes and you can really see that style and influence in this movie that which like “Airplane!” and “Robot Chicken” is essentially a parody or satire of Batman. The quick, non-stop pace, which was also used in the orignal LEGO Movie works for this film and keeps the movie going and it doesn’t really drain anyone except maybe the audience who can’t keep up with the pace. The life of the characters can’t be drained because they are at the same pace of the movie.

I guess the LEGO Movie brand of humor is a lot more of an acquired taste than I once thought.

For me, I kinda like the fast pace. Should some jokes have more breathing room? Sure, but in too many animated films, jokes can get dragged out to the point of cringe-worthy tedium. The LEGO movies smartly eliminate that problem by simply assuming that the audience can handle layered jokes told in a mile-a-minute fashion rather than running it into the ground.

If they had slowed down and told fewer jokes, the jokes they told would have been twice as funny. The direction style was to just bombard the audience with jokes, but that style never works. It just becomes tiring, and drains life out of the characters.

A better director would have had more faith in some of the jokes and would have emphasized some of them, instead of giving every joke equal emphasis.

Never saw the Lego Movie so I didn’t know he was supposed to be like that.

True true, but I do miss it…

To be honest, the shift from hyper-realism had to happen if future LEGO movies were to dip into other genres (superheroes, martial arts, racing, etc).

The LCU’s version of Batman was portrayed as an immature man-child from the onset. I personally feel that a lot of his ticks and traits in LEGO Batman were well-established in LEGO Movie 1 and enough so to where people were able to latch on to this version of the characters (he was a fan-favorite in LEGO Movie 1, after all).

One, the use of the Phantom Zone from Superman mythology, as incorporated into the LCU mythology, was interesting. It’s even more interesting knowing that there is a ‘multiverse’ of sorts within the LEGO world (or should it be dimension?). I don’t know if this is really the case, but I’m willing to bet that these are all villains that the Master Builders had put away at some point. I do have a feeling the we will see ‘The Ubers’ again.

Also, the time skip. Unless anybody didn’t catch it at the beginning, LEGO Batman takes place three years after LEGO Movie 1. LEGO Movie 2 is supposed to take place four years after LEGO Movie 1, and it’s been three years since LEGO Movie 1 came out IRL. So that’s cool to see that they are utilizing this gap in time (as it pertains to the ‘real world’ presented in LEGO Movie 1) to tell stories that may link up with each other down the line.