TL;DR: Troll 2 is a lightweight but entertaining kaiju romp that delivers on monster action but fumbles its deeper mythological and emotional ambitions. Fun, fast, and forgettable—worth a stream, but not destined for troll movie Valhalla.
Troll 2
I knew Troll 2 was going to be a wild ride the moment someone on screen yelled the immortal line about needing more wallpaper. In monster-movie terms, that’s like your GPS politely informing you you’ve driven into the ocean. It’s the Nordic remix of we’re going to need a bigger boat, except this time the boat is a fixer-upper Norwegian cabin and the thing tearing through it is a 50-metre moss-crusted behemoth who looks uncannily like Danny McBride after losing a wrestling match with The Last of Us fungus. This Netflix sequel to 2022’s Troll steps back into the fjord-soaked world of Scandi-kaiju chaos, but while the first movie had a wonderfully folkloric pulse, Troll 2 feels like it’s constantly fiddling with the radio dial, never settling on a station long enough to let the signal hit.
I’ve always had a soft spot for creature features that try to do something off the beaten path. I grew up watching Ray Harryhausen monsters stomp across matte-painted landscapes and later graduated to Pacific Rim’s neon-drenched kaiju slugfests, so when the first Troll dropped, its mix of myth, melancholy, and municipality-crushing mayhem hit me square in the geek cortex. Troll 2 tries to build on that foundation, but like an overambitious IKEA bookshelf, the pieces don’t always sit flush, no matter how hard you squint at the instructions.
The plot kicks off with a megatroll breaking free from a government black site, which instantly transported me back to those early-2000s straight-to-DVD monster movies where the military inevitably poked the wrong cosmic bear. Here, the bear is a towering chunk of sandstone attitude headed toward Trondheim with a vengeance, dead-set on settling accounts with King Olaf, Norway’s historical troll-vanquisher. The movie keeps hinting at juicy allegories: Christianity vs indigenous mythology, cultural erasure, maybe even a cheeky nod to contemporary immigration debates. But Uthaug keeps these ideas floating like background quest markers, never quite pressing the interact button.
And that’s the thing about Troll 2. Everything is almost. Almost mythic. Almost political. Almost emotionally resonant. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a free-to-play game that keeps promising a deeper narrative if you just complete one more mission, even though you suspect the loot box at the end is empty.
Returning heroes Nora (Ine Marie Wilmann) and Andreas (Kim Falck) are back on damage-control duty, and I genuinely love their dynamic. It’s got this charmingly awkward energy—like a pair of grad students trying to stop a 50-storey monster from interrupting their thesis defence. But Troll 2 treats their character arcs like optional DLC. Nora, a passionate trollologist in the first film, now fluctuates at whiplash speeds between empathetic monster-whisperer and grenade-lobbing crusader armed with holy water canisters. Meanwhile Andreas, once the lovable civil servant caught between moral duty and bureaucratic nonsense, barely gets enough narrative real estate to justify his presence.
The new addition, scientist Sara Khorami, injects a bit of spark into the cast, but the film never lets her take the wheel long enough to feel like a real part of the trio. I kept waiting for the movie to give her that big hero moment—the kind of Spielbergian beat where the music swells and you realise she’s the secret emotional core. Instead, Troll 2 seems to forget she’s in the party half the time, like when you go back to town in an RPG and accidentally leave one of your companions behind at the inn.
One thing the movie doesn’t skimp on is widescreen mayhem, and to be fair, that’s probably what most Netflix viewers signed up for. The highlight is a deliriously goofy set piece where the megatroll peels open the roof of a nightclub like it’s a fancy sardine tin and snacks on partygoers like après-ski tapas. I genuinely cackled. The VFX team brings a grimy, tactile texture to every collapsed building and airborne VW Polo, and there’s a kind of endearing earnestness in how the film stages destruction. It’s like watching a kid with a toy city gleefully knocking down skyscrapers—except the kid has a $40 million budget and a tasteful Scandinavian colour palette.
But even the smashy-smashy stuff suffers from tonal wobble. Uthaug tries to thread a needle between goosebumps awe and slapstick spectacle, but instead of creating a unique flavour, Troll 2 ends up tasting like a cinematic smoothie where none of the ingredients quite blend. One minute the film channels Spielberg’s sense of wonder; the next it switches to an Indiana Jones treasure-hunt vibe, complete with ancient MacGuffins. Then it pivots into Arrival-style interspecies communication beats, and just when you think it’s found its groove, it sprints in another direction like a Golden Retriever chasing six different tennis balls.
To its credit, the film hints at a larger mythic universe waiting in the wings, and I did feel flickers of excitement imagining what a more confident third instalment—Troll Legacy? Troll: Into the Trollverse?—could look like. The mythology of Norway is an absolute treasure chest of cinematic potential, and I kept wishing Troll 2 would slow down long enough to actually open the lid instead of tapping it with a stick and running away.
There are flashes of what made the first movie special: the sweeping vistas, the environmental themes, the grounded emotion simmering beneath the spectacle. But Troll 2 keeps deferring to the safest possible version of itself, the mockbuster wallpaper of modern streaming cinema. It’s fun in the moment, occasionally charming, and never outright boring—but it’s also ephemeral, vanishing from the mind as soon as the credits roll. Like a troll in direct sunlight.
In the end, Troll 2 is a good time if your expectations are calibrated to Netflix’s current creature-feature mode, where a couple of solid set pieces and a charismatic cast are sometimes all you need for a Friday-night popcorn watch. But if you were hoping for something with the folklore richness or thematic heft hinted at in the marketing, you may find yourself craving more than wallpaper repairs.
