Airplane II: The Sequel

Well I suppose a sequel was bound to happen after the success of the first film, but sadly this isn't a patch on that. Essentially, this is exactly the same film only we substitute a lunar space shuttle for the aircraft. "Ted" (Robert Hays) has been certified (by "Perry Mason" himself - Raymond Burr) after his wartime PTSD finally got the better of him - or, perhaps because he was just aware of flaws in the systems of the shuttle that the big bosses wanted to overlook. Anyway, he manages to escape custody and get a black-market ticket for the flight that duly goes awry. Can he stop it from crashing into the moon-base and thereby really irking William Shatner's "Murdock"? Most of the cast from the first outing have stuck with this, and there are quite a few entertaining parodies for the likes of Burr, Shatner, Chuck Connors, Bono and Rip Torn but the comedy ship had already sailed. This is a feeble imitation that struggles right from the start to find that sweet spot; the humour is more crass and vulgar delivering more emphasis on the disjointed box office cameos rather than providing us with a decent plot. It's watchable but quite forgettable.

A sequel that should never have been made because the first film did everything there was to be done.

After the success of “Airplane”, there was an immediate desire to make a sequel. However, the creators of the first film had serious doubts about this because they felt that they had run out of jokes about airplanes, that the film had done almost everything it could do and that there wasn't really a logical continuation for that work. And I think that feeling had a strong impact on the way this film was imagined: we are no longer on a plane, but on a space shuttle heading to a human colony on the Moon, somewhere in a future where the technologies and clothes are the same as from the period in which the film was made.

It is Ken Finkleman who directs and scripts, due to the refusal of the original creators to embark on this new project. New direction, new creatives, new team, but the “recipe” used was virtually the same as the previous film: situational comedy, sometimes quite mischievous, in a succession of jokes that may or may not work well and resemble a kind of collage of humorous sketches united by a common thread. The film's humor is reasonably good and I think there was a substantive effort to match the quality of the initial film. However, I believe that the directors/writers of the first film were right when they said that the basic premise was tired, and that it would not be a good idea to make a new film that was too identical.

In fact, the film's atmosphere is very warm, the ideas surrounding space travel are very far-fetched, the dialogues are excessively identical to those of the first film and even some of the best jokes are recycled and reused, in an effort to copy and paste that demonstrates a certain mental laziness. The pacing is decent enough, but the film, in general, doesn't give us an experience that could be said to be satisfactory. In addition to all this, I felt that the film also reuses part of the environments and settings from the first film. That is, if the story is set in the future and inside a lunar shuttle, why on earth does it continue to resemble the interior of a common plane? Once again, laziness, lack of investment in the project and, perhaps, lack of a decent budget.

The cast is, to a large extent, the same as what we saw in “Airplane” with the same characters and saying the same jokes, in the same situations. I can't say that the actors didn't try to make an effort and give us a job well done, but I'm sure they received bad material and were part of a project that should never have gotten off the ground. One of the most obvious absences is Leslie Nielsen, an actor veteran enough to have certainly realized that it would be a bad idea to take part in this new film. Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty are back, but they are not that interesting and the work they do is very weak. William Shatner is one of the few actors who deserves a positive rating, and who manages the job well enough.