Film Reviews

Posted: Sat., Dec. 31, 1988, 11:00pm PT

The Gods Must Be Crazy II

(Botswana - US)

Troskie/Weintraub. Director Jamie Uys; Producer Boet Troskie; Screenplay Jamie Uys; Camera Buster Reynolds; Editor Renee Engelbrecht, Ivan Hall; Music Charles Fox
N!xau Lena Farugia Hans Strydom Eiros Nadies Erick Bowen
Jamie Uys has concocted a genial sequal to his 1981 international sleeper hit The Gods Must Be Crazy that is better than its progenitor in most respects.

His tongue-clicking Kalahari Bushman hero, again played by a real McCoy named N!xau, is once more unwittingly embroiled in the lunacies of civilization.

First plotline has N!xau's two adorable offspring getting innocently borne away on the trailer truck of a pair of unsuspecting ivory poachers. N!xau follows the tracks and comes across two other odd couples from the nutty outside world.

There is a New York femme lawyer (Lena Farugia), who is stranded in the middle of the Kalahari with a handsome, phlegmatic game warden (Hans Strydom) when their ultra-light plane is downed in a sudden storm.

Then there are two hapless mercenaries, an African and a Cuban, who keep taking one another prisoner in a series of table-turning pursuits through the brush.

Uys orchestrates a desert farce of criss-crossing destinies with more assured skill and charming sight-gags, marred only by facile penchant for speeded-up slapstick motion.

(Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1989. Running time: 99 MIN.

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