Picks and Pans Review: Look Who's Talking Too

John Travolta, Kirstie Alley

When the high point of a movie is Travolta’s impersonation of Pee-wee Herman, you can be pretty sure the side-splitting laughs are going to be kept to a minimum.

Directed, as was the original Look Who’s Talking, by Amy Heckerling, this dismal sequel does have the unexpected effect of making you feel sorry for Roseanne Barr—all but ignored as the voice of Travolta and Alley’s new baby. Bruce Willis‘s voice returns as that of Mikey, though the fact that the boy, who now seems to be 3 or 4, speaks only in his thoughts is troubling. You worry about his health, and anyway, any standard 3-or 4-year-old is funnier than Willis can be spouting the lame lines of Heckerling and her writer-husband Neal (Police Academy) Israel.

The script is often vile. Barr (in the voice of an infant, remember) snarls, “Who is this asshole?” Travolta, sneering at Alley’s moody brother, Elias (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) Koteas, says, “Maybe climbing to the top of a tower and shooting student nurses would make him feel better.”

And when it’s not being vile, it’s banal: Alley, checking the couple’s joint tax return, complains, “You said it was okay!” “Well,” Travolta responds, “maybe it’s not.”

Whatever limited charm there was in the original centered on the notion of giving voice to a baby’s thoughts. If that film offered a childish pleasure or two, though, this one is just infantile. (PG-13)