The Gods Must Be Crazy II (1989)

A sequel arrives from 1989, assembled by the same patient hand that built the first one, and it does what sequels do: it reassembles the parts and trusts the chemistry. Xixo returns. His children clamber into a poachers' water tank and are hauled across the Kalahari, so he walks after them. Around this spine, four storylines tangle: a New York lawyer, a zoologist, a Cuban soldier, an Angolan soldier, and a pair of elephant poachers who are the closest thing to villains the screenplay can be bothered to construct. The machinery is clockwork. The gags are physical. Nobody is instructed in how to live.

On the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, this is a lean vintage. The San protagonist is genuine and central, though his presence derives from the setting and a well-worn noble-savage framing, not from any representational program. A woman lawyer exists, and she is competent, and the closing reel hands her to the zoologist anyway. Poaching supplies the villainy, which lends a faint conservationist tint and stops there. There is no economic critique, no body politics, no neurodivergent interiority, no reordering of the historical record. The film has other business.

What remains is craft. Ebert admired the patient construction of elaborate physical situations, and he was right to. Long, slow setups pay off through character, not message. A man crosses a desert to find his children. That is the whole of it. In an era of cinematic instruction, such an absence registers as nearly exotic, and the index reflects it. The film seems content to be funny, which it mostly is, and which is its own quiet refusal.