Square Eyes Special: High School Musical 2

What the sequel clearly lacks right from the outset is the original’s lack of pretension. Unlike its predecessor, HSM2 is fully aware of the size of the audience it is catering for. And while that doesn’t stop it trying to impress, at times there’s a sense that it feels it has to tick certain crowd-pleasing boxes rather than letting such moments come organically out of the script.

The opening number, What Time Is It?, sets the movie’s stall out fairly effectively: introduced by a montage of familiar locations from the first film — the cafeteria, the gym and the theatre — the song and dance starts inside the classroom before bursting out into the school corridors. All the main characters are reintroduced to the audience, lest they have been forgotten since the last rerun of the first movie. And just to show that this is a bigger movie all round, the choreography is turned all the way up to eleven. But look closer, and there are some subtle clues as to the progression of the film’s storyline: notably, as Ashley Tisdale and Lucas Grabeel (Sharpay and Ryan) progress through the school, everyone pays attention to Sharpay and not her twin brother. Amongst the colourful cacophony, little elements like that get lost. And that’s a shame, since it’s really Grabeel’s character that provides the narrative spine to this film.

Despite its name, it’s only the opening number which is set in school at all — the remainder is set during the summer holidays, where Troy (Zac Efron) is offered a job out of the blue at a country club. The offer has been made at the behest of Sharpay, whose parents own the club, with the express intention of stealing the school jock’s heart for her own. Sharpay’s materialistic nature — played up even more in this film — is expressed in Fabulous, a Material Girl-style fantasy number with echoes of Esther Williams and Busby Berkeley. The fantasy element to the number sits a little oddly with the rest of the film, but like all the songs presented here, it’s infectiously catchy, and works far better in vision than it does presented on the audio CD.

Unfortunately, the next number, We Can Work It Out, fails where the previous song succeeded. It’s shot and staged as if it were on the theatre stage instead of, as is supposed to be the case, the club’s kitchens — the principals in effect dancing while all facing the fourth wall. It’s an unusual misfire from director Kenny Ortega. Not that it’s the only one: while Troy and Gabriella are given their usual romantic power ballad, with You Are The Music In Me, the song itself ends with a gospel-style backing chorus. Eventually this role is fulfilled by the pair’s schoolfriends, but the chorus appears on the soundtrack way before they start singing along. It’s elements such as this which make it seem as if the music and production values therein have been decided way in advance of the film itself.

As Sharpay continues to get her claws into Troy, the cracks start appearing between the star basketball player and his friends, especially once he gets the opportunity to meet, and practice with, a university team. When Sharpay corners him into singing for the club’s staff talent show, it’s their respective partners — girlfriend Gabriella, and twin brother Ryan — who end up feeling left out. And despite a huge chunk of plot (whose idea was it to have a continuous half hour of the film with no musical numbers?), we end up at potentially the most interesting song of the lot — I Don’t Dance, which attempts to marry dance to baseball in the same way that Get’cha Head In The Game succeeded with basketball in the first movie. It doesn’t quite come off — again, partly because of the direction: one gets a sense that the outdoor location shooting took far longer than expected (look out for the wild variances in shadows throughout). Despite that, there are some great moves, most notably from Lucas Grabeel, who gets to show off what he’s really capable of after shedding the caricatured moves he had in the first film.

Of course, the severing of ties between Sharpay and Ryan means that Grabeel doesn’t get to partake in one of High School Musical’s greatest pleasures — seeing the big romantic number reworked into a camp, uptempo number. This time round, You Are The Music in Me gets the treatment, with Ashley Tisdale partnered with Zac Efron to produce a gloriously camp rock version, complete with Efron performing in falsetto (and yes, that is his own voice — in this film Efron gets to deliver 100% of his own vocals, after being dubbed by Drew Seeley for most of the first film). It revels in its silliness, and is the closest the sequel comes to regaining some of the spark that made the first film such a delight.

Another element of the first film that captured the fans’ hearts were the emotional ballads, and Gotta Go My Own Way taps into that, as Gabriella (Vanessa Anne Hudgens) breaks up with Troy. The overproduced nature of the songs, teamed up with Hudgens’ inability to look like she’s ever doing anything other than miming, detracts slightly from the quality of what is really a rather touching number. (For an extra visual joke, keep an eye on where Hudgens and Efron are standing while singing the bridge of the song.) Almost straight away, we get a solo number from Efron. Bet On It, I have to say, provides some of the most unintentionally funny moments in children’s television, as he sings while striding purposefully up and down the country club’s golf course. I sat through the whole thing being reminded of a Wired for Sound-era Cliff Richard. And not in a good way.

Naturally, everything must work out Happily Ever After™ in a Disney musical — and so the saccharine couple are reunited on stage, with Every Day acting as a curtain call for the entire cast. It’s okay, but the real musical thrill goes to what then becomes an encore piece (after a brief reprise of Your Are The Music In Me), the relentlessly upbeat All For One. It’s a real Sixties-style pop number, ensuring that as the credits roll you find that you’re left with a silly, cheesy grin all over your face. Which is, let’s face it, the point of the whole thing in the first place.

• High School Musical 2 airs on Disney Channel tonight at 6pm, with a repeat at 8pm on Saturday and a singalong repeat at 8pm on Sunday