The Notorious 1993 Flop Look Who's Talking Now! is Pure Yuletide Nightmare Fuel That Confusingly Has Nothing to Do with Babies
Most pop culture writers would only contemplate writing about Look Who’s Talking Now!, the universally reviled concluding entry in the Look Who’s Talking trilogy, if they were assigned to review it during its theatrical run or possibly when it came out on home video.
Due to the curious nature of my career, however, I find myself writing about it repeatedly decades after a disastrous theatrical run during which it earned the dubious distinction of scoring the dreaded “zero” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That means that not a single critic recognized by Rotten Tomatoes gave it a positive review.
I consequently wrote it up for my Zeroes column at Rotten Tomatoes and now I am forced to revisit this Yuletide atrocity for The Travolta/Cage Project and Travolta/Cage as well as My World of Flops.
It’s been a little over a year since I wrote about Look Who’s Talking Now! for The Zeroes but a whole lot has happened since then. There was the soft apocalypse of COVID-19 for starters but more importantly I began a project that obligated me to watch EVERY single movie John Travolta has made over the course of his exquisitely checkered career.
That of course includes Look Who’s Talking and Look Who’s Talking Too.
IF that weren’t enough, as one of the twelve theme months in my big 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin project I wrote about five Danny DeVito movies for Danny DeVito month (What’s the Worst That Could Happen, Johnny Dangerously, Mars Attacks, Wise Guys and Junior) and then four subsequent DeVito vehicles for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0: Ruthless People, Throw Momma From the Train, The Rainmaker and Heist.
So even though I wrote abut Look Who’s Talking Now! very recently in the grand scheme of things I nevertheless feel uniquely qualified to write about it now.
Being a dedicated scholar of the Look Who’s Talking franchise, I now understand its complexities and nuances in a manner I never previously imagined possible.
When George Segal pops up unexpectedly in a fantasy sequence dressed as Santa Claus while a tarted-up Kirstie Alley sucks suggestively on a phallic candy cane representing George Segal’s enormous penis in this talking dog Christmas movie for children, for example, I understood that it was referencing that in the first film it is established that Segal’s character is an extremely skilled lover, that he’s a big dick fuck machine who has got Allley’s WAP going nuts and even though he was her client and also married when they met, she can’t get enough of his eager, insatiable cock.
To cite another example, I’ve read that Travolta considers James, his character in the Look Who’s Talking movies, the closest to his real-life personality of any role he’s played. So when, in a typical act of staggering miscalculation, Alley’s wet blanket Mollie tells James before a job interview that he shouldn’t be himself, because he’s tacky and lame, and he DEFINITELY shouldn’t try to be funny, because his sense of humor is corny and terrible, it sure feels like she’s telling one of the most famously charming and irresistible movie stars of all time that he should act like someone else during a job interview if he wants to have any chance of landing the gig because his authentic self SUCKS.
Mollie might as well have told him that he shouldn’t smile, because it would make everyone sick, and he DEFINITELY should not dance because that’s the thing he’s worst at.
Mollie insulting her husband, his personality and his sense of humor at a time when he most desperately needs a pep talk and words of inspiration digs Mollie into a hole that she never even begins to work her way out of.
To cite still ANOTHER example of the kind of thing that only us real Talking heads know or care about, the previous Look Who’s Talking films established, to a perversely exhaustive degree, that Mollie wasn’t just an accountant: she’s someone who is deeply passionate about her job, a workaholic from a family of accountants who takes being a bean counter very seriously and is damn good at it.
That was one of the things that set the first film apart in a good and bad way. In Look Who’s Talking, working as an accountant is nearly as central to Mollie’s identity as a working single mother as motherhood.
So when Mollie is fired as an accountant just before Christmas, and then is unable to find work in her field, despite being an experienced and skilled accountant with a disconcertingly intense passion for the job, it feels vaguely sadistic, particularly since it’s only the first in an endless series of personal and professional humiliations Mollie will endure.
Look Who’s Talking was all about Mollie’s struggles as a working single mother with a messy personal and professional life who got pregnant by a married client and then had to navigate the complexities of single parenthood. It was a deeply personal film by a real auteur, Amy Heckerling, who directed two of the greatest films ever made about teenagers in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless.
By its third entry, the Look Who’s Talking series had somehow morphed from a movie rooted in its writer-director’s experiences with complicated motherhood with a crowd-pleasing talking baby gimmick into a talking dog Christmas movie that Heckerling did not write, direct or produce.
Instead that dubious distinction belonged to Madhouse helmer Tom Ropelkowski, who co-wrote the screenplay with his more talented wife Leslie Dixon.
By this point Mikey and Julie, the babies from the first two movies are talking for themselves, thankfully, but a franchise this creatively bankrupt and desperate isn’t prepared to forego tacky gimmicks altogether. So now instead of getting to hear the thoughts of human sperm, fetuses and babies we get to hear the thoughts of canine sperm, puppies and adult dogs.
As I chronicled during Danny DeVito Month, even though DeVito is a little man with a great big gut who often plays characters who are abrasive and obnoxious, the tiny little king tends to play characters with healthy sex lives, sleazy little schemers who FUCK.
That somehow holds true even when he’s voicing a sassy canine in a family Christmas film about talking dogs. In Look Who’s Talking Now! DeVito voices scruffy street dog Rocks, who, true to his name, gets his rocks off making sweet love with random dogs he encounters on the street.
Rocks, you old dirty dog!
By his own admission, he is a HOUND, both in the literal sense and in being a real pussy hound with a bunch of illegitimate children running around due to his laying doggy pipe all over town.
Look Who’s Talking Now! replaces its predecessor’s grotesquely inappropriate sex jokes involving sperm, fetuses and small children with equally inappropriate sex jokes involving animals.
So we’re treated to scenes where a fancy female dog tries to fend off the sleazy sexual advances of a suitor who implores, “I take you to the dumpster and all I get is a lick on a cheek?”, only to end up a single mother worried about her reputation because she’s “not that kind of a spaniel” and is terrified of what “the girls around the hydrant will say” of her sexual indiscretions.
Rocks grows up hard on the streets of New York, and I don’t mean that as a crude double entendre. He’s about to be put down when he rescued from certain death by James, who brings him home for the dog and Christmas-obsessed Mikey despite Mollie hating dogs. THEN James’ horny British boss sends the family ANOTHER dog in the form of Daphne, a stuck-up poodle voiced by Diane Keaton
Does Rocks call Daphne a bitch when she rejects his crude sexual advances? You better believe it! Look Who’s Talking Now! would not be a PG-13 family Christmas dog movie aimed at dumb babies if it eschewed the opportunity to have Rocks announce his hard-on immediately upon meeting his future love interest, (“Schwing!” he enthuses lustily) and then grouses, “Bitch!” when she does not reciprocate his advances.
Mollie doesn’t want one dog, let alone two, so her perverse solution to her predicament is to have both dogs live with them for a while and then, after her children have fallen hopelessly in love with the dogs tell them that one will be going away forever, never to be seen or heard from again.
Of course Mollie does not end up going through with her plan, but that’s only because Rocks proves himself and his worth by saving the family from having their jugulars ripped open by vicious wolves. Look Who’s Talking Now! Is PG-13 primarily because of all the smutty human and dog sexual innuendo but it thoroughly earns its rating with a shocking amount of wolf-related violence as well.
#ItMe!
It’s a testament to how phenomenally misguided Look Who’s Talking Now! Is that Zsa Zsa Gabor or Paris Hilton would have done a better job in the role of Daphne because their image and public persona are as pampered princesses leading lives of absurd privilege while looking down their nose at the ignorant rabble.
That has NEVER been Diane Keaton’s persona or her shtick. Quite the contrary. She’s quirky, smart and strong-wiled, onscreen and off so while Danny DeVito unsurprisingly gets to play Danny DeVito in dog form, a scruffy, lovable and good-humored underdog who FUCKS Keaton is stuck awkwardly playing a role that fits her and her sensibility about as much as wearing an outsized Juggalo hockey jersey onscreen would.
While Rocks and Daphne engage in some low-wattage Lady & The Tramp cosplay Mikey copes with the disillusionment that comes with realizing that Santa Claus is just a dude with a fake beard and a gambling problem while his sister, who maintains a J-Horror level of creepiness throughout, disappears into a bizarre fantasy world where she can realize her greatest dream, which is to soar over the head of her favorite basketball player Charles Barkley, who seems deeply confused as to why he’s appearing in Look Who’s Talking Now!
Mollie begins the film worrying that her hubby is just too much of a corny man-child to ever get a good job or make much of himself. Then he gets a good job as the personal pilot of Samantha D’Bonne (Lysette Anthony), a hard-charging corporate shark and major league sex bomb seemingly never more than a few seconds away from grabbing her employee’s phallus and telling him that she’d love to check out his cockpit, and by cockpit she means “penis.”
Then Mollie’s sole goal in life is to keep her husband from having sex with his horny boss, whose performance would feel more at home in an X-rated porn parody called Look Who’s Fucking than in what I will once again stress is a Christmas dog movie for children, from fucking hubby.
That job becomes more difficult when the scheming hussy her husband works for manipulates him into being away from his family and in a secluded cabin with her on Christmas. Will Mollie effectively cock-block her long-suffering partner? Will Rocks prove himself worthy of not being given away or put down? Will Look Who’s Talking Now! end with a music video featuring the cast and five year old rapper Jordy despite being a PG-13 movie full of sexual innuendo and the looming threat of violence? Yes, yes and yes.
As we have seen over the course of this project, when a John Travolta vehicle wants to connect with audiences despite being egregiously terrible it will resort to the sure-fire crowd-pleaser of John Travolta dancing. Look Who’s Talking Now! hits mashes that button hard in a manner that betrays its all-consuming desperation.
First Travolta dances with his wife and daughter while lip-syncing to Alvin and the Chipmunks’ Grammy-winning “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)” that only highlights the novelty song’s unintentional creepiness. Then Travolta dances his way through a fantasy sequence that begins with James dancing seductively with Samantha and Mollie contemplating ex Albert’s (George Segal) enormous fuckstick before the sequences overlap and Mollie makes her rival disappear, leaving behind only her breast implants. Still later, Samantha tries unsuccessfully to seduce James by asking him to teach her to dance after tricking him into being with her on Christmas.
The fantasy sequence where James lives out his paranoid wife’s worst fears by steamily boogying with his boss before turning his affections and attention towards her unsurprisingly represents the film’s only halfway successful or memorable sequence. That has everything to do with Travolta’s ferocious natural charisma as a performer and nothing to do with the almost impressively abysmal vehicle he is trapped in.
A couple of real DOGS if you ask me! #Laffs #Jokes #Fun #Dyinginside
Look Who’s Talking Now! was, thankfully, not the last time John Travolta and Danny DeVito collaborated. A year after Look Who’s Talking Now! belly-flopped with audiences and critics alike DeVito helped produce Pulp Fiction through his Jersey Films production company while Travolta picked up a Best Actor nomination as its lead. A year after that these towering icons of American film finally shared a screen together in anther instant classic, the beloved 1995 Elmore Leonard adaptation Get Shorty.
The last dying gasp in the Look Who’s Talking series left nowhere to go but up but even the most dedicated optimist could not have envisioned just how brilliant and important DeVito and Travolta’s subsequent collaborations would be.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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