This file was generated 2002-06-09 04:23 GMT. This movie's information hasn't changed since 2001-09-03.
Ack! Somehow I don't remember Airplane II being such a poor imitation of its predecessor. It took me some time to figure out why: no Zucker, no Abrahams, and no other Zucker. The writing and directing, handled by Ken Finkleman, are a far cry from the original. There's no sense of dramatic climax, no tension in the plot. Everything that crops up is resolved in minutes so something new can crop up. Instead of the dramatic need of a pilot to overcome his past failures, there's a man who knows exactly what to do, and achieves no comic effect doing it.
The sequel also falls short on individual jokes. Several attempts to recapture the joke style of the original don't make it. The cockpit-crew names, the newspaper headlines, the television news shows (featuring Pat Sajak!), and the fetishes of Captain Oveur just miss the boat. The movie parodies have cute moments, but copy things a bit too directly to evoke laughter. As in 2001, we have a mad computer that ejects crew members into space by opening an airlock, but so what? There's nothing funny about the ejection, it's just there.
The individual idiosyncrasies of the characters are also given extremely short shrift. There's no romantic tension between Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty, which was one of the driving forces of the plot in the first movie. Even the outbursts of Stephen Stucker don't feel as wacky. None of the passengers, not even a bomb- toting Sonny Bono, are memorable. Well, I'll admit that I remembered that Sonny Bono plays a bomb-toting passenger, but that's all I remember!
Although I have no confirmation on this, I've now heard that promotional air sickness bags were distributed for some theatrical screenings of this movie. They're desperately needed, given the horrible comedy.