This file was generated 2002-06-09 04:23 GMT. This movie's information hasn't changed since 2002-04-28.
It's hard to imagine that any sequel could live up to the original Wayne's World. Wayne's World 2 is a strong effort, with some brilliant moments, but it's not worthy. I suspect it's Del Preston, the Ralph Brown character, that weighs down the proceedings. He isn't nearly funny enough for his screen time. Who am I kidding? It's a lot of fun, has a great cast, and allows us to revisit Wayne and Garth one last time. There are surprisingly few recycled jokes across the two, so there is plenty of fresh material to enjoy.
The Wayne/Jeff fight scene was absolutely inspired. The joke with dubbing versus subtitling rings particularly true. It is also very amusing to see violations of the laws of physics that seem so similar to the ones six years later in The Matrix. In The Matrix, though, the object was to demonstrate the artificiality of reality, but in Wayne 2, the goal is to mock a venerable Hong Kong film genre.
There are two jokes that build at a glacial pace, but pay off big. They both took me by surprise because I'd missed the significance of the first few clues to both of them. This gave me the added pleasure of getting the jokes in reverse, a hobby of mine. I just went back and read the ending of The Graduate, and now I see that the joke was even more detailed than I'd realized.
Where to begin? James Hong has been in an insane number of movies, and I suspect his IMDB listing is incomplete. I recognized him as the restauranteur from an old "Seinfeld". Harry Shearer of Spinal Tap fame and Ted McGinley of "Married... with Children" fame both put in strange cameos. Drew Barrymore, Heather Locklear, and Kim Basinger need no introduction, and Barrymore and Basinger must be particularly good sports, given the natures of their characters.
I don't know if this is a particular flaw of the home video release or not, but the movie's dialogue seems poorly recorded, or perhaps poorly mixed. I don't think I've ever been as conscious of looping as I was for this. It drove a wedge through my verisimilitude that probably soured my outlook on the film as a whole. Any thoughts?