THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN DREADED SPOILERS! Having just watched this on Amazon Instant Video (And no they didn't pay me for that free advertisement but I'll sell out cheap! :D ) my perspective is as fresh as my frustration that what turned out to be the last film in the franchise (Funny how a bad entry can do that) didn't end things on a satisfactory note.
Since I don't know which you'd prefer first between the good & bad news in my review title anymore than the filmmakers apparently knew how to make a good sequel, I'll arbitrarily choose the good. (I'm an optimist, what can I say?) The music is quite good. Blythe Danner is quite good here as is instantly recognizable baddie John Ryan (Ever notice how most bad guys aren't the most handsome devils in the world of movies? And good guys are always handsome? But I digress.). Also I give them points for recognizing that they NEEDED to bring back Yul Brynner for the sequel.
To start off with the bad though whatever points I give for them realizing that they needed Yul Brynner are COMPLETELY negated by the fact they waste him utterly in this made for TV movie looking follow up. He was a virtually unstoppable killing machine in "Westworld", the inspiration for Michael Meyers (John Carpenter has admitted this) & The Terminator as well! Brynner was as The Gunslinger a complete & total BAD ASS! And how do they use him here in his last film? (Tragic when a great actor goes out on a stinker. Reminds me of Raul Julia's last movie being "Streetfighter".) They make him some kind of a Harlequin romance novel fantasy for Blythe Danner's character to get all hot & bothered about!!! I kept WAITING for them to introduce him into the movie thinking "When he shows up it's finally gonna get good!" only to see the aforementioned hippie dippy dream-time sex fantasy sequence! Their misuse of the STAR of this franchise, made all the more sad by it being his last film, was an EPIC FAILURE. I'm not saying that to satisfy me they needed to have him doing exactly what he did in the first one, running & gunning down good guys left & right, but why couldn't they have turned it around & had the good guys use him as their secret weapon when all seemed lost? If you've already seen this imagine how cool it would have been if The Gunslinger showed up at a "We're screwed now!"" moment blowing away his fellow robots with reckless abandon! THAT was what this film needed!
But I digress again.
Back to what's wrong with "Futureworld".
In a word. Fonda. In two words. Peter Fonda.
To say that the acting of Peter Fonda in this film was lifeless would be an insult to the dead. It would have been much more believable if they would have revealed that the character that we thought that we knew him as had in fact been a robot throughout the entire film and at least THEN we could have an excuse other than Fonda taking too many drugs in his life or just never bothering to hone his craft because with his name he didn't need to. He's a blight on this movie. Not that it'd be winning any Oscars without him mind you but he didn't do it any favors starring in it either. Makes you appreciate Blythe Danner's talent that much more though.
Ultimately what we have here is a sequel that failed for the same reason that most sequels fail.
They just didn't try hard enough to make a good film.
Since I don't know which you'd prefer first between the good & bad news in my review title anymore than the filmmakers apparently knew how to make a good sequel, I'll arbitrarily choose the good. (I'm an optimist, what can I say?) The music is quite good. Blythe Danner is quite good here as is instantly recognizable baddie John Ryan (Ever notice how most bad guys aren't the most handsome devils in the world of movies? And good guys are always handsome? But I digress.). Also I give them points for recognizing that they NEEDED to bring back Yul Brynner for the sequel.
To start off with the bad though whatever points I give for them realizing that they needed Yul Brynner are COMPLETELY negated by the fact they waste him utterly in this made for TV movie looking follow up. He was a virtually unstoppable killing machine in "Westworld", the inspiration for Michael Meyers (John Carpenter has admitted this) & The Terminator as well! Brynner was as The Gunslinger a complete & total BAD ASS! And how do they use him here in his last film? (Tragic when a great actor goes out on a stinker. Reminds me of Raul Julia's last movie being "Streetfighter".) They make him some kind of a Harlequin romance novel fantasy for Blythe Danner's character to get all hot & bothered about!!! I kept WAITING for them to introduce him into the movie thinking "When he shows up it's finally gonna get good!" only to see the aforementioned hippie dippy dream-time sex fantasy sequence! Their misuse of the STAR of this franchise, made all the more sad by it being his last film, was an EPIC FAILURE. I'm not saying that to satisfy me they needed to have him doing exactly what he did in the first one, running & gunning down good guys left & right, but why couldn't they have turned it around & had the good guys use him as their secret weapon when all seemed lost? If you've already seen this imagine how cool it would have been if The Gunslinger showed up at a "We're screwed now!"" moment blowing away his fellow robots with reckless abandon! THAT was what this film needed!
But I digress again.
Back to what's wrong with "Futureworld".
In a word. Fonda. In two words. Peter Fonda.
To say that the acting of Peter Fonda in this film was lifeless would be an insult to the dead. It would have been much more believable if they would have revealed that the character that we thought that we knew him as had in fact been a robot throughout the entire film and at least THEN we could have an excuse other than Fonda taking too many drugs in his life or just never bothering to hone his craft because with his name he didn't need to. He's a blight on this movie. Not that it'd be winning any Oscars without him mind you but he didn't do it any favors starring in it either. Makes you appreciate Blythe Danner's talent that much more though.
Ultimately what we have here is a sequel that failed for the same reason that most sequels fail.
They just didn't try hard enough to make a good film.