I thought this movie was a lot better than the first one, but the quality was still not great. My husband thought most of the scenes looked very fake. The acting is not superb, although okay for a pre-teen girls movie I suppose. I read the books first and enjoyed them much more than the movies. The books provide a lot more detail - my husband kept asking questions because he couldn't follow everything in the movie; there were some holes in the movie storyline that were filled in from the book. Overall, I thought it was decent, but it didn't live up to my expectation I had from reading the book.