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The Two Jakes (1990)
Rate:
2
Viewed:
8/03, 1/09, 5/21
1/09:
I've seen Chinatown many times but have a hard time mustering enough motivation to
watch The Two Jakes, a truly disastrous sequel.
Surely, the mood is as somber as it can be to invoke the melancholic feeling of what happened at the end of
Chinatown.
Yet The Two Jakes falls apart because of the incomprehensible plot. Where's the mystery? What revelations are being
made? There's nothing going on but two and half hours of fucking around.
Another disappointment is Jack Nicholson's direction. Every time I see him, he's not so much of Jake Gittes but Jack Nicholson.
Spotting Katherine Mulwray is so immediate from the first moment I saw Meg Tilly that it's a surprise Gittes didn't figure
this out. Some detective he is.
The pace is sometimes fast and then slow, thus failing to draw me into the story as it unfolds.
Often, the characters look and act modern for the 40's setting. The storyline, most especially the mystery, is
nonexistent; I only wondered why I was bothering with the film in the first place.
All in all, what The Two Jakes was missing is Roman Polanski, Robert Towne, and Jack Nicholson all rolled into one.
5/21:
It would be appropriate for the movie poster to announce the following: "Forget The Two Jakes. It's no
Chinatown."
What a massive disappointment the sequel is. The Two Jakes is an preponderous marathon with a terrible, nonexistent plot.
It's obvious the guy killed his partner from the get-go, and I have to watch everybody trying to figure out what happened
for more than two hours? That makes no sense. Neither is Harvey Keitel's disappearance for a long, long stretch of time. The
casting of David Keith as Loach is unbelievable because he looks young.
I don't recognize Jake Gittes in Jack Nicholson. What the heck happened? This is lazy acting on his part. The blame can
instead be laid squarely on Robert Towne for delivering a craptacular script. It's like either he forgot
Chinatown or
somebody else wrote the whole thing. Jack Nicholson admitted that the screenplay was 80% ready and that he had to rewrite a lot
of parts. Whatever...the language is just not there.
Speaking of detective work, I saw The Two Jakes for the first time during the 90's and knew immediately Kitty
Berman was Katharine Mulwray. Yet Jake couldn't figure it out for days? That's crazy. By the way, the real color of Meg
Tilly's eyes is dark brown, and she being fitted with bright blue contact lenses is distracting. Even the dye on
Katharine's hair looks artificial and cheap. Her mother had more class.
All in all, The Two Jakes is a disaster.