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Return to the Blue Lagoon
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| Year: |
1991
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Director: |
William A. Graham
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| Stars: |
Milla Jovovich, Brian Krause, Lisa Pelikan, Courtney Barilla, Garette Ratliff Henson, Emma James, Jackson Barton, Nana Coburn, Brian Blain, Peter Hehir, Alexander Petersons, John Mann, Wayne Pygram, John Dicks, Gus Mercurio, John Turnbull, Todd Rippon
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| Genre: |
Drama, Romance, Adventure |
| Rating: |
  4 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
The crew of a ship sailing through the Pacific Ocean notice a boat drifting nearby and set about drawing closer to see if there's anyone aboard. It turns out there is, three people in fact, but the two adults are dead from lack of water, though the infant with them who they assume to be the couple's child is still alive. The sole woman aboard the ship, Sarah Hargrave (Lisa Pelikan), is there with her baby girl, so she decides to look after the foundling which she does until bad news hits the crew: cholera has begun to infect them, so Sarah and the kids must abandon ship.
If you ever saw The Blue Lagoon (1980 version) and wondered what happened next, then this belated sequel would surely disappoint you right from the start, seeing as how it killed off the hero and heroine from that cult movie pretty swiftly to concentrate on their little boy instead. Once you were done reeling from that bombshell you would be noting that the business with getting the three main characters onto the same darn island was very similar to what had gone before. Indeed, what it was difficult to get away from was that Return was not so much a sequel as a remake, at least until the last act.
If your tastes were more for The Black Lagoon then you would find little to interest you here, as the closest they got to a water monster was a shark which hung around a specific area of the surrounding sea, just waiting to pick the characters off should they make a tactical error and wind up in the ocean when it was around. Aside from that, any dangers were not derived from Mother Nature, but from mankind; for a start, once Sarah and the kids are rowing away from the diseased ship accompanied by a burly sailor, he keeps harping on about how it would be easier to survive if the babbies were not around, which it's safe to say leads to a conflict with the guardian.
Certainly whacking someone with an oar then dumping their body in the sea is one way to solve that, or it's what Sarah does, and before long the three of them are island-bound once again. If you can imagine Lisa Pelikan as Leo McKern then you can see how this will play out, except that apparently recognising that the Brooke Shields epic was the way that many of its young audience found out about the birds and the bees without the awkwardness of asking their parents, for a while in this it turns into a sex education lesson, only with a giggly quality that it doesn't quite shift. Once the rules of reproduction are established, we can get rid of Sarah.
She doesn't feel very well one day and soon after is pushing up the daisies. Seemingly seconds later the two kids are not kids anymore and are played by Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause, ready to argue, tussle and fall in lurve, just like in the first movie. You may ponder that effort would be a better bet, it was funnier in places at any rate, and Milla might have agreed with you as she claimed this was the worst film she ever made, a bold claim considering her other cinematic endeavours. Just as this is grinding inexorably towards the teens making a baby - though not before a pretend marriage ceremony, just in case we were wondering how babies were made without the blessing of a wedding - a bunch of Australians appear. They include Captain's daughter Nana Coburn who catches the eye of Krause's obnoxious youth, creating a love triangle which goes nowhere (hey, they're married!) and also a nasty man who wants to steal Milla's pearl and more. By the end, you'll realise you've wasted your time, though Scorpius from Farscape is in it, so there's that. Music by Basil Poledouris.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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