Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 5, 1990                   TAG: 9005050326
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: STEPHEN HUNTER THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`GODS II' IS NOT AS MUCH FUN AS THE FIRST

I don't know who said that - in fact, it may have been me, just a few seconds ago - but it certainly seems to be the case with regard to Jamie Uys, the South African filmmaker who bumbled willy-nilly into a worldwide success called "The Gods Must Be Crazy" some years back.

Surely the gods are now mightily ticked at Uys: For his follow-up, "The Gods Must Be Crazy II" lacks the sense of innocence and delight and the great slapstick sequences that made the first a success.

Instead, the movie traffics in the most heavy-handed racial condescension in the movies in many a year. Innocent, childlike blacks wander about the Eden of the Kalahari being gulled by their naivete into a silly adventure, while about them twist various sets of white people, some good-hearted, some not so good-hearted, all of them imagined as cutely as possible.

It also sells a fairly dreadful variety of anti-feminism in which an uppity woman doctor is brought to earth (literally) by the elemental terrors of the Kalahari. The director keeps finding ways of subtly degrading the actress Lena Farugia: She's made to pull up her skirts and strike a grotesque pose to mimic a female ostrich, in theory engaging him so that her companion can steal an egg. An independent feminist, she would never come on to a man - so the movie arranges to force her to come on to a bird.

What sets the mild little story in motion is the disappearance of the two children of N!Xau, the wiry bushman who was at the center of the first movie. But where his quest to find the edge of the world set the first movie in motion, he doesn't do much in this movie except jog through the brush on the track of a vehicle in which his two kids - innocent of the reality of vehicles, of course - have accidentally taken refuge.

Meanwhile, on the flimsiest of pretexts, Farugia and her companion, a zoologist played by Hans Strydom, are isolated in the same rough geographical area. Finally, two soldiers, a Cuban and a black guerrilla, are stalking each other through the farcical shenanigans of the others, and soon they, too, are infected with the spirit of farce.

Uys' one gift, as evinced in the original, was his ability to find new ways to do the very earliest of movie tricks - the pratfall, the pie in the face, the chase, the fall-down-go-boom. But it all seems sadly ancient by this time, a meek distillation of what once, years back, was amusing. `The Gods Must Be Crazy II' playing at the Grandin Theater (345-6177), rated PG.