Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Following on directly from the first instalment, we make good on Doc Brown’s offer to stop unpleasantness happening to Marty and Jennifer (now a recast Elisabeth Shue)’s kid in the far flung future of 2015. Impersonating the junior version of himself, he stops his involvement with Griff Tannen’s criminal scheme, played by Thomas F. Wilson, of course, with only a minimum of hoverboard related mayhem. It’s just a shame Marty can’t take the antique sporting almanac back to ’85 with him for betting purposes.
That’s not a scruple that the elderly Biff Tannen has, who takes advantage of a window of distraction to nip back to 1955 and give his younger self the means to gamble his way to unlimited wealth, creating an alternate 1985 where he’s one of the richest, most powerful men around, and Marty’s step-dad, after George McFly’s death due to contract negotiation failure. If you are aged between 35 and 55 and exhibit symptoms, consult your G.P. immediately.
Realising what’s happened, it’s up to Doc and Marty to stop them, while Jennifer continues to remain as asleep as is possible to avoid having to write lines for girls or something. So off they head to 1955 to nick the almanac back from Young Biff, while avoiding the versions of themselves already kicking about this cluttered temporal junction.
In what’s still in the main a comedy, there’s not much point me giving you much more of a recommendation than to say that it remains extremely funny, due to a very clever script with precision-strike levels of recurring gags, sharp rejoinders, expertly paced cutaways, and of course the exuberance and energy that Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd bring to their roles.
Like the first, it’s going very much for a pop sci fi feel rather than any sort of serious prediction of the future, although you could make a case for it getting more right than wrong, flying cars notwithstanding, and at any rate this is much more interested in characters than in technology. Of course, a lot of those characters turn out to be the same actors in a range of makeups, which for me at least is more charming than chintzy, although your mileage may vary.
I don’t have a great deal more to say before opening this up to the floor – it’s a great sequel that plays with, if not exactly reinterprets, the original, the latter act dancing around the plot of the first film giving a pleasant twist on things that makes this more memorable than a sequel could have been. In short, it’s really funny, watch it.