There’s a malaprop-filled parody Twitter account called ” which chronicles the naughty lives of the geriatric set.
“Our ‘Naked Twister Night’ went as expected,” goes one of the tamer postings. “Harold and Joan lost their teeth and John can’t find his watch.”
It came to mind while watching the innuendo-filled yet PG-rated “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” a sequel whose title inadvertently also offers a two-word description of its subordinate quality.
“Grand Hotel” it ain’t. It even suffers in comparison to the 2012 original which I called “an early bird special of a film” that “will seem exotic only to those who see one or two movies of a year.”
The original was about a group of retirees spend their golden years at a ramshackle hotel in Mumbai run by a fast talking dervish played Dev Patel.
And so is the sequel. This time there’s a family quality to the relationships between he and his guests who have become integrated into the community.
Judi Dench buys fabric in the marketplace for export, Bill Nighy leads tours of the city, and the glorious Maggie Smith is helping Patel with his plans for expansion to a second location. Smith’s “Downton Abbey” castmate plays Nighy’s obnoxious estranged wife, and the randy trio played by Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup and Diana Harcdastle are looking for love in all the wrong places.
Richard Gere looks a little lost as a handsome stranger whom Patel suspects works for an investor he wants to help finance the new hotel and who has an affair with Patel’s mother, played by Lillete Dubey.
All this is tucked inside Patel’s frantic plans to marry the woman he proposed to in the first film, leading to the huge song and dance number that ends the new one.
There are a multitude of subplots but none of them feel connected, in a film written by Ol Parker and directed by John Madden, the same team from the first film. The usually charming Nighy is grating as Dench’s clumsy suitor; Gere, a spring chicken by comparison, looks like he regrets being there; and Smith, at least, is saved from appearing in a third film, should there be one, except as a hologram.
Before, it was nice to see British acting royalty all in one film. This time – to paraphrase Frank Zappa, who had he lived would himself have been a septuagenarian – it’s like they’re only in it for the money.
** Two stars
With Dev Patel, Maggie Smith, Danny Mahoney, David Straithairn, Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie, Richard Gere, Ronald Pickup, Diana Hardcastle, Tina Desai, Shazad Latif, Subhrajyoti Barat, Jayesh V. Kardak. Produced by Graham Broadbent, Peter Czernin. Written by Ol Parker. Directed by John Madden. Rated PG. Approximate running time: 122 minutes.
Tags: Dench, Maggie Smith, Nighy, Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Posted by