Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, The (Blu-ray)

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While the movie and the characters remain as sweet as ever, this time out they're more sugary sweet, more melodramatically sudsy. I mean, there is only so much hugging, kissing, and crying and so much syrupy music a person can take in one movie. "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2" has enough of these timeworn, romantic movie ingredients for four such pictures. When the quartet of girls wind up diving off a cliff in the sun-drenched Greek island of Santorini, we get about as far from reality as a film can take us.

Trivia note: If you were to watch this movie back-to-back with "Cast Away," you'd get the longest FedEx commercial in the history of advertising.

Video:
While the look of the video on the standard-definition version of the movie was just fine without distinguishing itself in any particular way, the video presentation on this Blu-ray disc is exceptional. Warners use a BD25, VC-1, 1080p transfer of the film's original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, where the colors show up beautifully, rich and deep, as natural and realistic as you could want. Definition is sharp and clear, with detailing excellent even in darker areas of the screen. Black levels are fairly strong, and a light grain, hardly noticeable, provides a film-like texture to the image. Mostly, this disc displays a spectacularly beautiful picture quality.

Audio:
The disc's audio comes in regular, lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 and lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1, both of which are somewhat nondescript. If the characters didn't speak, you'd hardly know the movie had a soundtrack at all. The audio is front loaded, with most of the dialogue, music, and sound effects coming from the forward channels. Every now and then, you hear some musical bloom in the surrounds as well as the occasional environmental noise--cars, birds, crowds. There is little need for a wide dynamic range or an extended frequency response, so we don't get much from them. Fortunately, the midrange is smooth and natural, a tad more so in TrueHD than in Dolby Digital, and voices come across quite well.

Be aware, however, that as usual Warner Bros. make the ordinary Dolby Digital the default audio, so in order to hear TrueHD you have to select it at start-up. Other studios at this time have seen the wisdom of defaulting the audio to the highest, lossless codecs because if one's equipment can't play them, the equipment will automatically switch to the lossy audio streams, anyway. That seems to me a more convenient method of handling multiple audio streams on a disc than forcing the user to remember changing soundtracks upon start-up.

Extras:
The high-definition extras begin with a short, four-and-half-minute featurette, "Go Jump Off a Cliff," which details the origins of the film's climactic scene in Greece. Then there are four additional, deleted scenes, each introduced by the director, totaling about eight-and-a-half minutes. And there's a four-minute gag reel. That's about it, except for a bonus disc with digital copy of the film (for PC or Mac); twenty-five scene selections; English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese spoken languages; French, Spanish, and Portuguese subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Parting Shots:
There's isn't much going on in "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2" that seems fresh, innovative, inspiring, uplifting, or even very romantic. It's mostly a collection of stereotypes and clichés, culminating in exactly the climax one would expect. The movie should satisfy fans of the books and maybe even satisfy some, but not all, fans of the first film. I enjoyed the first film immensely, for instance, but found this second installment rather commonplace and monotonous. On the other hand, the Wife-O-Meter thought this second film was just as sweet as the first film but dealt in slightly more adult issues.

As Truman said, "The pants stop here." Or maybe not. I could see our following these characters into their old age, with the pants slowly dissolving into tatters. We shall see.

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