Grease 2 - 1982

 The only nice thing here was Michelle Pfeiffer, the epitome of beauty. Other than that, it was terrible, boring and useless and slow and even annoying.

It wanted to recall the previous one, of course, so we have Frenchy again, and the usual Pink Ladies and T-Birds, and of course songs and dancing… only that here the songs are only acceptable, the dancing is boring, often way too long and not really well done (when there are way too many people) because nothing in a movie should ever feel fake, and if it does that it’s not well done.

The story is simple: Michael is a new student at Rydell High School, all the way from England, and he falls in love at first sight with Stephanie, one of the Pink Ladies. She already broke up with T-Birds frontman Johnny, but she says no when Michael asks her out because she wants someone with a bike… easy right, so he loses the jacket, starts making school essays for others in exchange for money, then he puts together a bike (really, studying a book and actually putting it together with his own hands) then he starts learning to ride it, of course, and in no time he can jump any length, out-speed anyone, you get the idea. He wears big goggles with the helmet, so nobody can recognise him, and when he appears she immediately falls for him, but he can’t talk to her face to face at school so he goes to take her away from work on his bike and they spend a day together, and she’s crazy about him. Just like that, because he has a motorbike, even though she has never seen his face… yeah, right.

Then he tries to talk to her again in school, and since she failed an essay on Shakespeare, he offers to help, and she agrees and they meet for a burger and talk, and she tells him about ‘the guy’, and after he corrects a sentence of her essay, using big words like ‘incestouse’, she thinks he’s super smart and kinda likes him too, but not really because he’s no biker…

At the talent show night, where kids compete to win a prize in money based on their talent as singers, Michael leaves immediately because the gang goes after him, but at one point in the road he makes the big jump, while all the others stop, and Steph thinks he died. She’s very very sad but then he comes back, finally takes away the goggles and she kisses him anyway, quite happily actually, because she got the smart and the cool all in one handsome package.

All of a sudden Johnny gives him a T-birds jacket so he’s one of them and can date her without breaking the rules, and that’s it.

Boring, really. The musical number at the beginning (going back to school) and the one at the bowling were too long and with too many people, they looked fake, the ‘reproduction’ number in class and the one when she thinks he’s dead are boring and kind of embarrassing, not at all what they were going for, I imagine. They were probably supposed to be funny and touching :-/

 

The four idiots in black are annoying, Johnny is not a likeable character, nothing like Danny at all.

Michael is not a well developed character, he just looks at her with fish-eyes or sigh after her.

Actually, come to think of it, it’s the ‘male’ aspect of the movie that is all wrong (I mean in the casting, there’s lots of things wrong with the rest). The girls weren’t bad. Not their fault if their characters were shallow, they did their part. I even liked Ms Mason :-)  

The script is really boring and shallow, there are no Sandy and Danny here, no real love, no real story, no character-depth at all. There’s a moment when her friends tell Stephanie that according to the rules the Pink Ladies are the T-Birds’ chicks, so she should not pine after a mysterious and unknown biker, and she replies that maybe she doesn’t want to be ‘somebody’s chick’ anymore, but that’s just a line out there, nothing more on that, on the contrary they write things so that it’s exactly like that that things will keep going on. She falls for the biker in black and he will become one of the T-Birds, so she can keep being a Pink Lady and follow the rules, by dating a T-Bird.

:-/