`My Girl 2″ is one of those movies in which a father condescendingly gives his 13-year-old daughter bowling tips, then tries to pick up a spare himself and blows it, after which the girl pulls off a strike. It is the kind of movie where, when the teenager announces, “Maybe it’s time I get my own apartment,” the father promptly proceeds to drop the ball on the alley.
Furnished with a sitcom sensibility, it is formulaic and flat, artificial and forced, with director Howard Zieff and screenwriter Janet Kovalcik providing an unregenerate chirpiness and a sort of Gidget-y marzipan mind-set. “Vada Goes Californian,” perhaps.
The place is small-town Pennsylvania, the period is the early ’70s and the film continues the story of big-eyed, big-smile, big-name Vada Sultenfuss. Two years ago, you may recall, she survived the bee-sting-reaction death of her best friend (Macaulay Culkin), and is now trying to track down the biography of her mother, who died shortly after Vada was born. Vada Sultenfuss, obviously, is carrying a lot of baggage.
Not to worry. As appealingly played again by Anna Chlumsky, she is precocious and perky, despite the fact that her tuba-playing undertaker father (Dan Aykroyd) is a bit of a dork and that she has to move out of her room to make way for the baby her benign stepmother (Jamie Lee Curtis) is about to deliver.
Assigned in English class to write an essay about someone she doesn’t know, she pulls an upset by choosing her own mother, who had grown up in Los Angeles. Her father is little help, having known his wife only a brief time, but as it happens, Vada’s uncle (Richard Masur) has moved to L.A., so she flies off to take her spring vacation there.
Her escort is a brash, freeway-smart teenager (Austin O’Brien of “Last Action Hero”), the son of her uncle’s lady friend who intially grouses about having to play tour guide to a girl, but eventually winds up mooning over her. As Vada talks to her mother’s high school classmates, along with an eccentric poet who had taught her at UCLA-by sheer coincidence, he just happens to be Vada’s favorite poet in the world-she starts to piece together her Mom’s life, then makes a relatively startling discovery.
While it is refreshing to see a film not awash in obscenities and gunplay, “My Girl 2” is just plain tedious. Kovalcik and Zieff (who also directed the emotionally manipulative original) toss in stereotypical California-crazy supporting characters, as well as a feeble, cranked-up subplot involving a sports-car-driving cardiologist who tries to put the make on auto-mechanic Phil’s comely live-in co-worker (Christine Ebersole).
Reprising his role, Aykroyd again walks through it, delivering his lines perfunctorily, and while Curtis is acceptably adequate, it is Chlumsky who again is the best thing about it all. Still, while her character’s wise-beyond-her-years dialogue in “My Girl” was rather winsome, in “My Girl 2” it is rather annoying.
”MY GIRL 2”
(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by Howard Zieff; written by Janet Kovalcik; photographed by Paul Elliott; edited by Wendy Greene Bricmont; music by Cliff Eidelman; produced by Brian Grazer. A Columbia release; opens Friday at the Esquire and outlying theaters. Running time: 1:39. MPAA rating: PG. Language.
THE CAST
Vada Sultenfuss………………………………Anna Chlumsky
Harry Sultenfuss……………………………….Dan Aykroyd
Shelly Sultenfuss………………………….Jamie Lee Curtis
Nick Zsigmond……………………………….Austin O’Brien
Phil Sultenfuss………………………………Richard Masur
Rose Zsigmond……………………………Christine Ebersole
