The Travolta/Cage Project #30 Look Who's Talking Too (1990)

I try not to use phrases like “opportunistic”, “mercenary”, “unnecessary”, “money-grubbing” or “gratuitous” when writing about sequels because the much-maligned form is almost by definition opportunistic, mercenary, unnecessary, money-grubbing and gratuitous by definition. We assume that sequels will be born of cynical calculation rather than creative inspiration, that the catalyst for their existence will be financial rather than artistic in nature. 

Yet I have absolutely no problem describing Look Who’s Talking Too as opportunistic, mercenary, unnecessary, money-grubbing and gratuitous. 

I’ll go further. Look Who’s Talking Too is so insultingly devoid of inspiration that it implicates the sequel as a form. Look Who’s Talking Too is the reason people fucking hate sequels. Look Who’s Talking Too is the reason critics and audiences are inherently suspicious of sequels. 

Roger Ebert famously posited Zoolander as part of the reason our country was hated abroad. He was widely mocked for his assertion but I have no doubt that’s true of Look Who’s Talking Too. It’s easy to imagine Osama Bin Laden taking in an afternoon screening of Look Who’s Talking Too and deciding then and there that any culture that could create such an abomination needed to be punished, if not destroyed. 

To call Look Who’s Talking Too an egregiously terrible movie is overly generous because it suggests that Amy Heckerling’s sustained insult to the public’s taste, intelligence and judgment is a motion picture and not seventy six minutes of aching emptiness, a nothing burger of a movie with nothing to say and no reason to exist. 

Or rather, Look Who’s Talking Too has no creative reason to exist. This is not a saga that needed to continue. It was not a story that needed to be told. It’s barely a story at all, so much as a half-hearted hodgepodge of C-stories from Baby Talk, Look Who’s Talking’s TV spin-off, lazily tossed together to create what can very generously be deemed a movie. 

I’m sold!

From a financial standpoint, however, Look Who’s Talking Too had every reason to exist. After all, the original came seemingly out of nowhere and grossed three hundred million dollars on an exceedingly modest budget. Even if a sequel were only a fraction as successful at the box-office, it still stood a good chance of making a healthy profit. Look Who’s Talking Too got appropriately dire reviews and grossed less than a quarter of the original yet probably still made someone some money, which is all this was ever supposed to do.

So a mere fourteen months after Look Who’s Talking was released to good reviews and boffo box-office a quickie sequel lurched onto the screen with none of the quirky, personal charms of its predecessor and all of its nagging flaws in unusually pure, concentrated form. 

This includes a central gimmick that never worked in the very successful original and just gets more obnoxious over time, namely the conceit of being able to hear all of the inane garbage thoughts these stupid babies are having over the course of their inane misadventures. 

#Nightmarefuel

Like its predecessor, Look Who’s Talking opens with crowd-pleasing animation of sperm in a mad quest to penetrate the egg, only this time Heckerling and co-writer Neal Israel decide to add an inexplicable element of sexual coercion/violation to the family-friendly fun. 

See, Mollie’s egg (Kirstie Alley) REALLY does not want sperm to sneak into her, as evidenced by her telling the aggressive sperm things like,  “You can’t bully me! You can’t get past this diaphragm! Neener, neener, neener! Hey, buster! This is my womb! Get out of here! Shoo!! No! Don’t! Stop that!” only to have the sperm reply in a voice full of unmistakably sexual urgency, “You know why I’m here!”

When the egg protests, “No! Stop that!”, clearly illustrating a lack of consent, the sperm, undeterred, angrily demands, “give it up, give it up!” and “let me in, let me in, baby! C’mon, mama, hot mama!” 

The idea is for the sperm and egg to recreate the push and pull of adult courtship inside the womb but it plays more like date rape. The egg says no repeatedly but the sperm pushes on all the same, concerned only with its own needs and desires. 

This disturbing tableau results instantaneously in a fetus who will grow up to be Julie (played as a baby by first Megan Milner and then Georgia Keithley) whose thoughts we hear in Roseanne Barr’s nasal bullhorn of a voice, beginning with, “Well here I am. All conceived and nowhere to go!” 

The umbilical cord threatens to strangle Julie in the womb, wrapping around her throat like a necklace made of human flesh but thankfully she’s got a wisecrack OR TWO for the occasion, quipping first “This will teach me to accessorize!” and then “I heard life is short but this is ridiculous!”, a hilarious allusion to potentially being stillborn. 

Mikey is very excited about being a big brother until the baby is born and he comes to the horrifying realization that this adorable little human being will compete with him for his parent’s time and love and attention and has the innate advantage of being tiny and helpless and fragile. 

Mikey is jealous, as illustrated by a montage sequence of him seething with envy over the attention his sister is getting to John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy.” Bear in mind the filmmakers do not play an excerpt of “Jealous Guy.” No, they play “Jealous Guy” IN ITS ENTIRETY because it’s the most on the nose musical cue possible but also as a way of running out the clock. 

It doesn’t matter to the filmmakers that “Jealous Guy” is about romantic rather than familial love because it seems to have gotten those two concepts hopelessly mixed up. 

For example there is a sequence later in the film set to “I Enjoy Being a Girl” where Julie imitates her beautiful, glamorous mother as she gets all dolled up for a very special purpose. It’s a scene that would be way cuter and less disturbing if the special purpose Mollie is getting dressed up for didn’t involve being so sexually irresistible that when her estranged hubby sees her in skimpy lingerie, reeking of Parisian perfume, he’ll want to fuck her brains out and take her back immediately. 

I could live my lifetime without the shot in Look Who’s Talking Too where Alley sprays perfume on her alluring cleavage in a tight, low-cut teddy followed immediately by her year-old daughter spraying water on her torso in imitation just as I could have lived without pre-natal vaginal humor. Yet Look Who’s Talking Too contains this odious sequence and it’s not about to wait until Julie’s birth to start in with the jokes about baby genitalia. 

In what qualifies as Look Who’s Talking Too’s primary plot pretty much by default, John Travolta’s goofy cab driver/pilot James and Mollie break up pretty much solely for the sake of giving the film at least the illusion of drama, conflict and stakes. 

Otherwise the best this half-hearted, unsuccessful attempt at a movie can muster are cutting room floor-ready subplots involving Mikey’s anxieties about potty training and Mollie’s unhinged, gun toting, right wing accountant brother Stuart (Elias Koteas) staying at James and Mollie’s home despite James dislike for the pistol-packing lunatic. 

Damon Wayans, who was red-hot at the time thanks to In Living Color, took over for Richard Pryor in the role of Eddie, a pre-verbal baby who gets all of the chicks because he’s potty-trained. Eddie is only onscreen long enough to establish that he’s an incorrigible womanizer who has left a trail of broken hearts all over the sandbox. The Look Who’s Talking franchise clearly does not share my belief that infants should never be sexualized, even for the sake of terrible, lazy jokes. 

Look Who’s Talking Too isn’t a real movie but rather 76 contractually obligated minutes of deleted scenes cobbled together. Actually that’s not entirely true. Look Who’s Talking Too is a loose and limber delight during the two minutes when James visits a baby gym run by Gilbert Gottfried and the Saturday Night Fever star treats the kids, the audience and a deeply impressed Mollie to two minutes of dancing exuberantly to Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up.” 

The scene has a narrative purpose in that it causes Mollie to realize that she’s married to a man who looks and moves like John Travolta, and has Travolta’s charm, and maybe a guy like that is worth holding onto and/or pursuing. But mostly this set-piece exists for the sheer pleasure of watching Travolta dance and because the filmmakers understood that even if audiences rejected everything else, John Travolta dancing to Elvis alongside babies is as foolproof and irresistible as you can get.

The “All Shook Up” sequence is a potent reminder of how wildly entertaining and charismatic Travolta can be when he has something, anything to do. Only five years separated Travolta’s big comeback turn in 1989’s Look Who’s Talking and his even bigger comeback turn in 1994’s Pulp Fiction. That’s not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things but Pulp Fiction undoubtedly looked even more impressive in light of the egregiously terrible, insultingly mercenary garbage that preceded it, particularly this and its somehow even worse, even more screamingly unnecessary sequel, which looms horrifyingly in our very near future. 

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