Smokey and the Bandit II

The screenplay, by Jerry Belson and Brock Yates, is not so surreally funny as the one for the first film, but funny lines are not what the picture is about. Smokey and the Bandit II is about movement, action, frustration and destruction, and Mr. Needham, one of Hollywood's most successful stunt artists before he became a director, is very good at this sort of thing. Smokey and the Bandit is entertaining in a brainless way.

You don't mess with a sure thing. So Smokey and the Bandit II is carefully designed to cash in on the same box office bonanza as its namesake. The plot - about transporting an elephant to the Republican Convention - is obviously just an excuse to get this cartoon show on the road, where the cast can ham it up unashamedly.

Three years after Smokey and the Bandit took the hard-drinking, fast-driving, trickster ethos of the American redneck into the big box-office league, Reynolds has proved he just does what he does best: show off. A lightweight chase caper that Reynolds must truly be sick of by now, but which he has elevated into something impossible to dislike.

Sally Field tells Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit II that he is no longer having fun doing what used to come naturally. This stale sequel seems to be evidence of going through the motions for money instead of fun. Ironically, the best part of the film is the unusual end credit sequence, which shows the actors having fun when they blow lines in outtakes.

Smokey and the Bandit II -- is a premeditated embarrassment. It seems to prove that entertainers who discover a successful formula may not have the foggiest notion of how to protect, duplicate and sustain it.

There is no need for this movie. That's true of most sequels, but it's especially true of Smokey and the Bandit II, which is basically just the original movie done again, not as well.

So unimaginative that it's more of a remake than a sequel. Reynolds and his buddies all act as if they're in a home movie as they rehash the same tired gags and dull chases that filled the original.