MOVIE REVIEW : Sequel Blahs for ‘Neverending Story 2’

As you watch “The Neverending Story 2” (citywide), you may be more reminded of “The Wizard of Oz” than the first “Neverending Story,” but not necessarily in a nice way. You also may be reminded of bad Saturday morning TV and the enormous discomfort many another sequel has put you through.

The first “Neverending Story” movie, adapted in 1984 from Michael Ende’s magical children’s book, was a huge European hit. Directed by Wolfgang Peterson, it was an off-beat, splendiferously visualized hymn to the magic of storybooks set in a fantasyland called, appropriately, Fantasia.

In its charming conceit, the 10-year-old hero, Bastian, descends into the book of the title and fights his way through illustrations come-to-life amid a sweetly excessive gallery of talking rock piles and flying doggies.

In “Neverending 2,” Bastian is back--though performed by a new actor, Jonathan Brandis--and so are Fantasia, the Childlike Empress, the talking rock pile, the winged dog and the charming conceit. This time around it’s not so charming. This is another unimaginative sequel, spun out in an unengaging by-the-numbers style.

The ideas often suggest a prefab “Oz.” But the script is so perfunctory, it can’t engender any emotions, even though it keeps trying in a businesslike way, to squeeze them out. The dialogue is awful: alternating between cutesy “Give me five!” vernacular and stiffly ornate pseudo-literary flights.

Director George Miller is Australia’s other George Miller: not the wildly kinetic helmsman of the “Mad Max” trilogy, but the man who directed the hugely popular transplanted Western, “The Man From Snowy River.” “Snowy River” was a terrific-looking film and parts of “Neverending 2” are well-realized, particularly the massive backgrounds--glowing with a Maxfield Parrish clarity and line--of the endless fairy-tale vistas.

And there is one semi-wonderful performance. Actor Martin Umbach and the creature creators make an improbable triumph of the spy Nimbly, a huge fowl with deferential wings and ineffably sad eyes. Starting out as a sort of recycled “Big Bird,” Nimbly gradually establishes a real sympathetic bond with the audience. Almost nothing else does.

For the rest, “The Neverending Story 2” (MPAA rated PG) is a story you may want desperately to end. Soon. It continually founders over weak dramaturgy and vacuous dialogue, beginning with gross kitchen slapstick and continuing through phony uplift and joyless cliffhangers. Trying to trip its way up both the yellow brick road and the previous movie’s terrain, it winds up stumbling down the stale, slick trail to Sequelville--the Purgatory of marketing strategies and strangled fantasies.

‘The Neverending Story 2’

Jonathan Brandis: Bastian

John Wesley Shipp: Father

Clarissa Burt: The Queen

A Warner Brothers presentation of a Dieter Geissler production. Director George Miller. Producer Dieter Geissler. Executive producer Tim Hampton. Screenplay by Karin Howard. Music Robert Folk. With Kenny Morrison, Martin Umbach. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG