MOVIE REVIEW : Tiresome ‘Gods Must Be Crazy II’ Tries Too Hard for Laughs

In his vastly successful “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” director Jamie Uys treated his leading characters, the tribal Bushmen of the Kalahari desert, in a paternalistic and patronizing manner. “Gods II” (citywide) makes no such distinctions. This time, everyone in it--except the animals and one of them looks stuffed--has something to cringe about from the sheer exhausting dumbness of the action.

The wonderful N!Xau is back, completely wasted as a minor character, running, running, running, running after a poachers’ truck which has inadvertently carried off his two inquisitive children: his daughter, played by 9-year-old Nadies, and son, played by 5-year-old Eiros. You can be sure that the children and the animals have a high adorability count.

Also involved are two strangers to each other--a truculent South African research zoologist (Hans Strydom) and what the press kit delights in calling “a high-powered New York attorney” (Lena Farugia). Part of her high power seems to be her knack of leaping so that she’s sitting on the zoologist’s shoulders, her legs straight out on either side of his ears, her skirt over his face, each time a frightening animal appears. There are a lot of frightening animals in the Kalahari desert.

In addition to the poachers, the children, the dogged N!Xau, the research zoologist and the high-powered New York attorney, add one Cuban with the Angolan army and one Unita scout--forever firing at one another--a tiny skittery airplane and more animals. More leaping.

Uys has decided that all that speeded-up action, the most tiresome part of his first film, was where its charm lay, not with the gentle, endearing N!Xau and friends. So he’s laid on the cartoony action: soldiers running out from behind trees, bouncing off one another to a bonnnnnging drum sound, and in place of the Jeep climbing a tree, he has the airplane do it.

The wonder is that anything in a country this exotic, full of such potential wonder, could be made this enervating, but as you watch that high-powered attorney’s dress come right up over her head one more time, you realize that Uys is exactly the writer/director to manage it.