The Odd Couple II (1998)

The Odd Couple 2 (1998): Dir: Howard Deutch / Cast: Jack Lemmon, Walter Mathau, Jonathan Silverman, Christine Baranski, Jean Smart: The original film was a big hit in 1968 and led to the engaging comic pairings of its leads. This thirty year new sequel is nothing more than a road movie with lackluster locations and a complete lack of anything that made The Odd Couple so memorable. What is truly unfortunate is that Jack Lemmon and Walter Mathou are hilarious but in the original they emerge as personalities whereas in this dreadful sequel they are merely props. They play Oscar and Felix and the road trip to get to a wedding between Oscar's son and Felix's daughter. Boring setup trudges the formula and arrives at absolutely nothing. Directed by Howard Deutch who previously directed both leads in Grumpier Old Men. He does his best here but is up against a wall in creating anything as good as the original. The supporting roles are basically there to sideline the humour spewed by the leads. Jonathan Silverman plays Oscar's son in complete one note fashion. Christine Baranski also appears to what avail. The Odd Couple is hilarious and engaging so it is with great regret that after thirty years the best that could be constructed for a sequel had to be this pathetic and sorry sequel that should be dropped in an inner-state during the filming of this dull road odyssey. Score: 1 / 10

Back in 1970 Neil Simon wrote an Original Screenplay (as opposed to adapting one of his stage plays for the screen) entitled The Out Of Towners in which husband and wife Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis were frustrated in their efforts to travel from Ohio to New York and faced more frustration when they finally did arrive there. Now almost three decades later Simon has rewritten it so that what is essentially the same plot finds Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau frustrated in their attempts to travel to the Californian nuptials of Lemmon's daughter and Matthau's son. I'm not criticizing or complaining. Anything written by Simon is fine with me and anything written by Simon and featuring Lemmon and Matthau is even finer and there are, after all, only seven basic plots as we all know. The leads of course are reprising the characters (Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison) they played in The Odd Couple (Matthau had, in fact, created the role of Oscar Madison in the original Broadway production and though it is widely acknowledged that sequels rarely work this is an exception with enough Simon one-liners to keep most of us happy. Recommended.

Oscar's son is marrying Felix's daughter... and the "odd couple" will now be traveling across California to try and find the wedding. But anything that can go wrong will go wrong when you're dealing with these grumpy old men.Normally, I don't think you wait 30 years to make a sequel... but they did it (probably setting some kind of record). And, you know, I liked this film. I watched it with my brother and my father, and I found it to be a good film for a family to watch (but an older family, because the language is a little bad). It's funny in a more or less clean way (no smut) and it's a no-brainer film (just more of Mathau and Lemmon tearing into each other).I liked some of the jokes more than others ("the crutch store" is pretty funny) and a lot of it was sort of cheesy. But it's also cute to see two old men try to pick up women half their age and get stranded in a desert. That's just so silly -- old men! Old men, who aren't timid, with no secrets.That's really all I can say about this one. It's just like watching "Grumpy Old Men", but it's in California rather than in the woods. Otherwise ,it may as well be the same film. Which works. Because unlike other films that seem to be copies of themselves, this has more of a "Laurel and Hardy" or "Abbott and Costello" feel where you can't imagine these old men doing anything differently. Check it out for an easy laugh.

It is hard to believe it was only eight years ago that this, the last of the Lemmon and Matthau (or Matthau and Lemmon) films was made, and within four years both stars would be gone. One only wishes that their last film together had been more of a success. They had done first rate sequels before with GRUMPIER OLD MEN, but that film had been done within two years of GRUMPY OLD MEN, and a natural momentum carried the stars (and supporting casts) to the finish line. That is not the case with THE ODD COUPLE II. It came out thirty years after the original THE ODD COUPLE, and while they are reunited with the play's creator (Neil Simon) on the screenplay, the momentum - the push - is lacking.Not that this is a boring film. Far from it. We always wondered how Oscar Madison and Felix Unger would have behaved as elderly men. Of course, Felix looked like he and Gloria were going to settle their differences and return together in the first play/movie. Indeed, in the television series Tony Randall did get back to his wife. But here it is obvious it did not work at all. Both men have remained divorced, and both men remain essential the same: Felix the compulsively organized neatnik and Oscar the incorrigible slob. They also have given each other a wide birth if possible. But they find themselves drawn back into mutual orbit. Oscar's son is getting married - and to Felix's daughter. So the pair are headed for the wedding, and that means jointly showing up.What happens is a series of joint misadventures on the way to the wedding, especially involving two rather fun young women that they meet (Christine Baranski and Jean Smart) with their jealous boyfriends. This leads to several, increasingly odd, run-ins with the sheriff of a small town they can't seem to successfully leave. Indeed, in one case they get a lift out of town in a beautiful white classic Rolls Royce, which moves more slowly than a pair of people on bicycles.The situations are all quite amusing. But the unity of the film is not there - it is like a series of skits involving Felix and Oscar, that are vaguely united because the two characters are familiar to us, and they are supposed to get to the wedding. Still the two stars give it their all, and with Baranski, Smart, and the late Bernard Hughes it works well enough as an entertainment. But for me, the wackiness and variety of OUT TO SEA make that film a better final film for the pair.