Daniel Jolley 2005-12-31
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
I love Grease (as a little kid, Olivia Newton-John was the first to show me there's more - a whole lot more - to girls than cooties), and I was quite prepared to go the rest of my life without seeing Grease 2, a movie I've never heard a good thing about. Then a friend tells me I need to watch it, that she loves Grease 2, and I see it has Lorna Luft in it (whose mother - Judy Garland - I adore), and so I watch it. For the love of everything ever considered cool, how did this happen? How can you take one of the coolest movies ever made and turn around five years later and release what has to be the worst sequel in motion picture history? Apparently, it took five years of hard work to take everything Grease did so right and figure out a way to do it all so wrong. The story, the music, the acting - in a word, dreadful; no, make that two words - embarrassingly dreadful. Grease 2 is even worse than Xanadu.
People say you shouldn't compare this to Grease; you've got to judge Grease 2 on its own merits (it stinks whichever way you look at it, by the way). How can you not compare this to Grease? If they didn't want me to compare this to Grease, they wouldn't have called it Grease 2, they wouldn't have taken me back to Rydell High, they wouldn't have resurrected characters like Principal McGee, Coach Calhoun, and Frenchie, they wouldn't have passed off this new kid from England as Sandy's cousin, and they surely wouldn't have thrown me back amongst the Pink Ladies and the T-Birds. Speaking of the T-Birds, it hurts to see how far they fell in a mere two years (the movie is set in 1961, two years after Grease). Johnny (Adrian Zmed) and Goose (Christopher McDonald) are made in the image of Danny and Kenickie, but they just don't measure up. These new T-Birds turn tail and run whenever Crater-face and his gang of greasers come roaring up.
Everything is reversed in this movie, especially the central plot. Here you have a new, goody-goody male student having to transform himself into something "bad" in order to win over the less than sophisticated girl. Maxwell Caulfield isn't all that bad as Michael Carrington, but the guy's got as much charisma as a toasted cheese sandwich. Stephanie (Michelle Pfeiffer) won't give him the time of day - even if she did, the Pink Lady code wouldn't let her date him. And so it is that Michael decides to transform himself into T-Bird material. Once he has a motorcycle and learns how to ride it, he runs circles around the greasers and wins Stephanie's heart - but only as Mr. Excitement in goggles, not as himself. What will happen when she finds out her danger man is Michael?
I won't even get into the whole subject of the big talent show, except to question why kids who see themselves as cool not only make fools of themselves willingly, but begin practicing some eight months before the actual show. I will get into the subject of the music, though. I don't know what this music is; it isn't 50's music, and it isn't 60's music. It's horrible, and all the dance numbers that go along with it are even more horrible.
Count me among the untold number of Grease fans who refuse to recognize Grease 2 as a sequel. I'm going to have to watch the original again - and soon - just to reestablish a sense of equilibrium in my life.