While the original 'Code 8' movie (as well as the original short film) certainly wasn't perfect, its biggest strength was in its storytelling and being able to accomplish a lot with very little. This is best exemplified by the montage that plays over the opening credits of that film of fake documentary clips and news reports detailing the history of the fictional Lincoln City and how those with powers went from being exploited by the "normal" population to build the city to being feared by them when they were no longer considered useful, and thus being largely forced into degrading menial work that pays pitifully or else turn to various avenues of criminality in order to make ends meet. This set up not only the world of the movie but the central conflict for the main character perfectly in the span of about 5 minutes. By contrast, the sequel tries doing the exact same thing (producing a condensed version of the previous opening with added exposition about the "guardian" robots of the last film being replaced with supposedly safer "K9s" in this one) bur it ultimately falls flat since very little in the film actually follows up on the issues presented in this opening montage.
It's almost as though the film couldn't quite decide whether it wanted to be a direct continuation of the first one, dealing with the fallout of everything that happened between Garrett and Connor, or a completely new story set in the same universe; in the end, it winds up being an extremely awkward combination of the two. The Garrett/Connor conflict is, at least to me, the far more interesting storyline that we're presented with, largely due to the Amell cousins inevitably having great chemistry as actors and it actually justifying the movie being a sequel rather than a spinoff, but even that has its share of issues as the film has Connor deciding to put his trust in Garrett far too times and far too easily despite the very first scene demonstrating that he had already learned his lesson on that front.
As for the main storyline of the girl, her brother and the cop...I'll be honest, it's very difficult to care about any of them. The girl especially is clearly supposed to function as the emotional core of the movie but she's ultimately little more than a living McGuffin (i.e. A filmmaking term to describe a thing that everyone wants but is never fully explored beyond that). We learn next to nothing about either her or her brother except that...they're poor, he's Garrett's latest betrayal-minded protégé (you'd think after Connor and the first movie he'd have learned to be at least a bit more careful on that front) and she's apparently supposed to be clever. And she's special because she has a one-in-a-million power that does very little but serve as a plot device and only becomes somewhat useful in the last few minutes of the film. The cop is a little more interesting, though he falls a bit too quickly into all-out comic-book villain territory for my taste. The other new characters that are introduced either don't make much of an impact either way and/or are copies of characters from the first movie (Garrett's even got himself an all-new and almost completely identical gang, right down to their powers).
Overall, it's a film with good acting, decent effects (though to my mind, they're not as seamless as the first one), good cinematography for the most part, but is let down tremendously by the writing and general plotting of the story. Ideally, you want events in a story to move seamlessly from one thing to another based on the decisions of the characters...which in turn are derived from their personalities; here, it's more like events jumping from one to another with very little connecting them (for example, Connor finds the girl at the community centre where he works and she clearly doesn't trust him...then in the space of a jump cut, he's somehow got her inside and she's happy to go with him based on a mostly-offscreen conversation with a character she's never met before - at least onscreen - and the audience barely knows). And talking of events not naturally appearing to follow on from each other, the ending is just...bad.
If you liked the first one, I'd say it's worth watching this one if only for the majority of the Connor/Garrett storyline but it's not necessarily a film to go out of your way to see.
It's almost as though the film couldn't quite decide whether it wanted to be a direct continuation of the first one, dealing with the fallout of everything that happened between Garrett and Connor, or a completely new story set in the same universe; in the end, it winds up being an extremely awkward combination of the two. The Garrett/Connor conflict is, at least to me, the far more interesting storyline that we're presented with, largely due to the Amell cousins inevitably having great chemistry as actors and it actually justifying the movie being a sequel rather than a spinoff, but even that has its share of issues as the film has Connor deciding to put his trust in Garrett far too times and far too easily despite the very first scene demonstrating that he had already learned his lesson on that front.
As for the main storyline of the girl, her brother and the cop...I'll be honest, it's very difficult to care about any of them. The girl especially is clearly supposed to function as the emotional core of the movie but she's ultimately little more than a living McGuffin (i.e. A filmmaking term to describe a thing that everyone wants but is never fully explored beyond that). We learn next to nothing about either her or her brother except that...they're poor, he's Garrett's latest betrayal-minded protégé (you'd think after Connor and the first movie he'd have learned to be at least a bit more careful on that front) and she's apparently supposed to be clever. And she's special because she has a one-in-a-million power that does very little but serve as a plot device and only becomes somewhat useful in the last few minutes of the film. The cop is a little more interesting, though he falls a bit too quickly into all-out comic-book villain territory for my taste. The other new characters that are introduced either don't make much of an impact either way and/or are copies of characters from the first movie (Garrett's even got himself an all-new and almost completely identical gang, right down to their powers).
Overall, it's a film with good acting, decent effects (though to my mind, they're not as seamless as the first one), good cinematography for the most part, but is let down tremendously by the writing and general plotting of the story. Ideally, you want events in a story to move seamlessly from one thing to another based on the decisions of the characters...which in turn are derived from their personalities; here, it's more like events jumping from one to another with very little connecting them (for example, Connor finds the girl at the community centre where he works and she clearly doesn't trust him...then in the space of a jump cut, he's somehow got her inside and she's happy to go with him based on a mostly-offscreen conversation with a character she's never met before - at least onscreen - and the audience barely knows). And talking of events not naturally appearing to follow on from each other, the ending is just...bad.
If you liked the first one, I'd say it's worth watching this one if only for the majority of the Connor/Garrett storyline but it's not necessarily a film to go out of your way to see.