Review: Back to the Future Part II

Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and the eccentric Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) venture into the future of 2015 (!) to stop something tragic from happening to Marty and his family. In 2015, Marty and his lady love Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) have a couple of kids (played by Fox himself), but after the crisis is averted, old nemesis Biff (an artificially aged Thomas F. Wilson) gets control of the DeLorean time machine and a copy of sporting statistics. When Marty and Doc get back to 1985, they find it has changed to a depressing degree and that Biff (who handed his sports statistics knowledge to his 1955 counterpart to use for greedy purposes) is a rich tycoon who basically owns the town. He’s even married to Marty’s mother (Lea Thompson)! The only solution is for Marty and Doc to travel back to 1955 to stop the two Biff’s from conspiring with themselves. Or each other. Brain hurts.

This 1989 sequel from director Robert Zemeckis (“Back to the Future”, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, “Forrest Gump”) and screenwriter Bob Gale (“Back to the Future”, Walter Hill’s “Trespass”) holds a special place in many people’s hearts (Scientist Carl Sagan for instance) for reasons that to this day still escape me. Not everyone loves it, but it does have a cult out there. I’ve never liked it, still don’t, and it’s nowhere near a patch on the first film. For the most part I think it’s an overdone, garish, and heavy-handed comedy not too dissimilar in tone (deafness) to Zemeckis’ later and even worse “Death Becomes Her” (with a touch of “The Klumps” or “Nothing But Trouble” thrown in for bad measure). And that’s a shame because I liked the first film well enough, and there’s a few neat ideas somewhere in here.

Although the Alan Silvestri (“Forrest Gump”, “Young Guns II”) score is one of his best, things get off to a horrible start with a totally rushed, dickish opening scene. It’s cheap and insultingly lazy, really. Speaking of lazy, star Michael J. Fox appears to be merely going through the motions here, whilst co-star Christopher Lloyd manages to be the highlight along with the score. Looking back on the film from a 2017 perspective, it pretty much whiffed on its prediction of the future of ‘2015’. Hoverboards aren’t really a thing, at least nowhere near what they’re depicted to be here. So you have to accept this worldview as pure fantasy. After that dopey false start we do get a funny gag about “Jaws” and its fake shark, as well as cute depictions of Ronald Reagan and Michael Jackson as Max Headroom-ish characters on TV. However, it’s not long before all the older/younger/alternate Martys and Biffs suck the life out of the whole thing. The acting and makeup are just too broad and garish, with Thomas F. Wilson in particular overacts even more annoyingly than ever before. He runs riot here and stops the film dead. The segment set in a future run by Biff starts off interestingly bleak and depressing…but then Biff Klump blows it all to hell with his heavy-handed ‘comedic’ shtick. The makeup is terrible throughout too, with no one convincingly aged.

For the most part the film is dumb and boring, though at least here’s one time-travel film that has the good sense to at least warn against seeing your future/past self. A lot of movies fuck that up (much as we’re talking about pure fantasy of course), including the horribly overrated “Looper”. Things get a little confusing in the second half, but I think it checks out and plays by the rules (Like the later and underappreciated “Project Almanac” the key is to not establish eye contact with yourself). Otherwise there’s one cute bit every half hour or so, and that’s just not nearly enough for me. It’s no fun, either. Silvestri tries his best to inject some energy, but it’s to no avail. It’s completely inert. You can see how this bleeds into the subsequent film that was actually filmed back to back, but the ending here is pretty corny aside from a very amusing cameo by Joe Flaherty.

Yeah, this one kinda sucks I’m afraid. I know it has its admirers but I think it’s joyless, heavy-handed, and the only cool ‘futuristic’ things here are the hoverboards and the shoes.  Christopher Lloyd and composer Alan Silvestri try hard, but this one’s a dreary slog. Criminal wastage of the lovely Elisabeth Shue, too.

Rating: D+