Back to the Future, Part II

1989's BACK TO THE FUTURE, PART II is a textbook example of "Middle Trilogy Syndrome." Films that do their damndest to outdo the original while creating a suitably intense bridging toward the conclusion.  Director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Bob Gale throw everything into overdrive to the point of viewer exhaustion.  It really is quite interesting how something so imaginative and energetic can also be so deflating and indifferent.  I'm not usually one to use phrases like "too clever by half"....but that really nails it here.  It was as if these guys, while fashioning the script, excitedly paced the room and shouted out every wild hair that occurred to them.  In the end, I feel their concoctions actually diluted what made the first film so special. 

This is especially true of the third act, when Marty (Michael J. Fox) returns to 1955 to prevent Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) from obtaining (from the older version of himself) the sports almanac that will tell him the scores of future games, leading to an alternate 1985 that will find Mr. Tanen a wealthy casino tycoon who turned Hill Valley into a cesspool of gambling and drugs.  Marty will watch himself, from his first visit, engineer the fateful kiss between his future parents.  Sounds clever, and is.  And the '50s scenes are by far the best ones in this sequel.   But it all feels too coldly ingenious, where unfettered creativity leads to emotional diminishing returns. 

Things again get complicated for Marty, who begins this adventure traveling with Doc (Christopher Lloyd) to 2015, because "something has to be done about your kids."   While some of this movie's future predictions kinda/sorta came true, these scenes are easily the worst part of PART II.  Surprisingly bad.  In every possible way - bad sets, bad costumes, comic timing that is off.  Just the ideas behind them are disappointingly dull.  These scenes are actually some of the worst of Zemeckis' career. 

Then we reach that bizarro 1985, and things get interesting, and surprisingly dark.  Leering and violent. I have to give the filmmakers some credit for their chutzpah, but several of these scenes just feel like something out of a straight-to-video low grade B-movie.  The heart of BACK TO THE FUTURE grows black and dour here, and while these developments are vivid, they just felt wrong.  Born perhaps out of a late night round of scotch for Bob and Bob. 

And then Marty returns to the '50s.  The film finds its mojo here, nicely weaving sly humor and those patented Zemeckis/Gale close call chases and scrapes.  But, I dunno, it still rings a bit hollow.  The literal parallels to the first movie just seem kinda desperate, too much.  What the original did so well was enage us on a human level while we marveled at its ingenuity.  BACK TO THE FUTURE, PART II feels like a cold exercise,  a stew of brainy musings from the Bigger is Better school.  But it is still a fun and rollicking throttle, unmissable for fans of this series.