Airplane II: The Sequel (1982)

Airplane II: The Sequel arrives with the confidence of a film that believes the joke has not yet been told. It has. Ken Finkleman, who wrote Grease 2 earlier that same year, was handed the controls after the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker collective declined to return, and the result is a shuttle bound for the sun with a crew of familiar faces and a script that fires gags at a rate intended to overwhelm the memory of its predecessor. The vessel is called Mayflower One. The computer is called R.O.K. The passengers are in peril. This is the level of discourse on offer.

Assessing the film's social consciousness requires little effort, because there is none to assess. The cast is uniformly white. The romance between Ted and Elaine is a boilerplate reconciliation. The comedy draws its energy from puns about coffee and a suicidal bomber, not from any engagement with the culture around it. Ted Striker's post-traumatic stress and his confinement in a mental institution are mined for laughs, which places the film at a comfortable distance from modern sensitivities regarding psychological suffering. Elaine is a capable computer officer who spends the final act being rescued and then married. The film has no interest in the politics of its moment, and none in ours.

There is something almost restful about a comedy this uninterested in instructing its audience. Corporate negligence appears as a plot mechanism, never as an argument. The sun-bound trajectory is a destination, not a metaphor. The result is a machine for jokes, running at roughly the efficiency of a shuttle with a shorted core. It is not a good film. It is not a film with a message. On the matter of cultural messaging it scores as a 1982 spoof should, which is to say it minds its own business and crashes into the Moon.