Tuesday, August 27, 2024

The Gods Must Be Crazy II (1989)

Yeah, they made two of these. This time, Xixo (the same character as Xi in the first movie, still played by N!xau, not sure why they changed the name) is chasing after a poacher's truck after his kids were fascinated by it and climbed on. Along the way he encounters an American lawyer (Lena Farugia) here for a conference who got stranded with a zoologist (Hans Strydom, seemingly going to Tom Selleck as Magnum P.I.) after a storm blew their light plane into a tree.

Plus, two soldiers on separate sides of what I think is a civil war, who take turns capturing the other and driving towards their respective bases. That's assuming the Communist soldier (who's from Cuba, so I guess they're in Angola?) can figure out which direction his base is.

There's still a lot of sped-up camera humor, whether it's the Cuban soldier driving between the brush trying to find his prisoner while yelling that it's against the Geneva Convention to escape, or the lawyer leaping on the zoologist's shoulders every time she sees a lizard. But this movie does a better job tying those gags into the story than in the first movie. When the lawyer only jumps onto a tree stump the third time, the zoologist makes a comment she only jumped 24 centimeters and that he was a little disappointed. A few minutes later, he steps on a honey badger and leaps on a big stone, prompting the lawyer to joke he jumped 124 centimeters. And then the movie lets the badger bit build, as first the zoologist throws his boot away so the badger can 'take revenge,' only to decide he can't walk around with one boot. He returns for the boot, then steps on the badger with his other boot, prompting it to follow him into the desert.

(He eventually gets the badger to leave him be, however, I expected it to make a dramatic appearance at some point later. Chekov's Badger never arrives.)

I actually liked this one more than the first movie, which I wasn't expecting. This movie, perhaps because it's 10 minutes shorter, is quicker to get the principal characters together so they can start playing off each other. The original spent forever on the gags about the ecologist and the crappy Land Rover, it brought the whole thing to a halt. Here, the zoologist and lawyer are quickly thrown together, the lawyer stumbles across first Xixo and then the soldiers, then Xixo finds the zoologist. The poachers are only loosely tied in, but they're really just there to create an excuse for Xixo to set out on another quest, the initial trail he follows that causes him to cross paths with all these "strange gods." Once he's helped them with their various problems, he resumes his quest and finds his kids.

Which I guess makes these movies the equivalent of the sidequests you encounter while playing a FallOut game. Instead of investigating a vault full of insane clones of Gary, Xixo helps a Cuban soldier who just wants to avoid being taken prisoner so he can catch the boat shipping him home.

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