Look Who's Talking Now! (1993)

The third and final installment of the Look Who's Talking franchise arrives having already exhausted its central gimmick twice. The babies who once supplied the internal monologue have aged into children with nothing to say, so the voices migrate to two dogs, Rocks and Daphne, voiced by Danny DeVito and Diane Keaton. James pilots a private jet for a scheming executive named Samantha, Mollie loses her accounting job and takes work as a mall elf, and the household absorbs two canines who bicker over the family's affection.

Consider the film's cultural ledger, and we find it blank in every column. The cast is white, the concerns are domestic, and the stakes are Christmas and canine jealousy. Race never surfaces. Neither does sexuality, nor climate, nor any argument about the body, the mind, or the historical record. Samantha is a wealthy woman with designs on a married employee, and her money functions as a plot device, a means of stranding James upstate. Nobody suggests that her wealth is the problem. She is an inconvenience with a private estate. Charles Barkley appears briefly as himself, a sight gag for basketball fans, and the film asks nothing more of him.

The picture has no sermon to deliver. Its ambitions extend to a wolf encounter, a beeper, and a radio broadcast that restores a child's belief in Santa Claus. Critics were unkind at the time, and the box office was worse. We are left with a curiosity: a sequel so empty of message that it becomes, in its own way, restful. We file it accordingly, with nothing to record and no lesson to absorb, and we move on to the next screening.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}