Look Who's Talking Too (1990)

Look Who's Talking Too arrives in 1990 as the second installment of a franchise that had, one year earlier, discovered that babies with adult voices could turn a profit. Amy Heckerling directs, and she co-wrote the script with Neal Israel. The result is eighty-one minutes of potty training, sibling resentment, and a talking toilet voiced by Mel Brooks. The critics of the day were unkind. Gene Siskel mourned the loss of the original's romance. Others reached for words like witless and vulgar. The film grossed $120.9 million worldwide anyway, which tells us something about the audience, and perhaps about the species.

The picture concerns Mikey, a toddler voiced by Bruce Willis, adjusting to a new sister named Julie, voiced by Roseanne Barr. There is a potty, a gun-toting uncle, a robber, a kitchen fire, and a closing family barbecue. The narrative resolves when everyone agrees that grown-ups make no sense. It is a broad comedy of the sort that has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. No character undergoes a reckoning with systemic injustice. Nobody discusses identity, power, or the environment. The film's entire moral universe can be summarized as: do not touch the hot stuff.

Two Golden Raspberry nominations followed, for Gilbert Gottfried and Roseanne Barr, which feels about right. We are left with a document of its moment, a commercial sequel assembled with evident haste and no discernible sermon. Heckerling would go on to sharper work. Here she presides over a product that wants only to be liked, and largely fails at that. The classification is straightforward. This is a film without a message, which is its own kind of distinction in any era, and certainly in this one.