| Caddyshack II |
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| Tuesday, 18 May 1999 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In ‘Caddyshack II,’ rich but blue-collar construction mogul Jack Hartunian (Jackie Mason), a self-made millionaire, attempts to fit in with the snooty country club set to please his class-conscious daughter. Jack doesn’t fit in with the old money crowd, who he in turn despises as a bunch of narrow-minded snobs. A war of legal threats and practical jokes results, culminating in a golf match to determine whether Jack will keep both the country club fairway (which he has acquired and accessorized as a miniature golf course) and his construction business or lose everything. No fair guessing how it comes out. It’s impossible to tell who the makers of ‘Caddyshack II’ thought their audience was. Golf fans who loved the original ‘Caddyshack’ will be outraged that there’s barely any golf at all until well over an hour into the film, which qualifies as bait-and-switch, given the advertising. Nearly everyone else will squirm in boredom at the predictable slapstick, banal romantic subplots and the overall lecture on class prejudice. This last is a reasonable topic for comedy or drama, but here it’s so broadly drawn that it might as well have come from a Saturday morning cartoon. The humor isn’t cruel or offensive, but nearly all of the jokes fall flat. ‘Caddyshack II’ is woefully unhip and uninspired, looking very much like a product made to cash in on the success of the original rather than because anybody thought they had a good idea for a sequel. Spectacularly bad films usually require initial ambition on somebody’s part -- at some point, one or more of the filmmakers has to believe they’re on to something unique. Nobody involved in ‘Caddyshack II’ seems to be laboring under that delusion. The results are not memorably terrible, but they’re still bad.
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