The Two Jakes ( 1990) Believe it or not (as Ripley says).....it.took us 30 years to catch up to this movie....
Simple explanation: In 1990, when this famously disastrous "Chinatown" sequel made its way into the world, BQ hardly had a single moment to watch a movie......any movie.
Why? Simple. In the middle of our long career in the video industry, we found ourselves in the belly of the beast.......toiling in the hellish corporation that was Blockbuster Video.
Populated with backstabbing reptiles who existed within an organization similar to James Bond's nemesis S.P. E.C.T.R.E.., working at Blockbuster became a literal hell on earth...... we still cringe and recoil at the memory of our one miserable year there.....which still stands as the longest and very worst year of our adult life........
We escaped in the nick of time, with our sanity and moral compass still intact (which is more than we can say about the people who ran the company)........and as for the BB execs we suffered under there, we can only hope for a future of rotting in hell for the ones who aren't dead already.......
Which explains the irony of never having time to watch a movie while enduring 18 hour days in enslavement to America's prime purveyors of......movies.
Which movie were we talking about again? .....oh right....."The Two Jakes"......
We could spend another 5 hours describing the tortured, unbelievable backstory of how this film finally made it to the screen........and promptly crashed and burned, because it couldn't possibly reach the high bar set by the original movie.
Some it's downright bizarre.......such as the film's legendary young Paramount mogul Robert Evans wanting to play the 'other Jake' opposite Jack Nicholson's sardonic private eye J.J. 'Jake' Gittes......a role ultimately given to Harvey Keitel.
Never much of an actor even when he was an actor, Evans lost his chance due to his ruinous plastic surgery, and 'Chinatown' writer Robert Towne, who'd planned to direct the sequel himself, lost his chance when the project fell apart. Jack Nicholson determined to salvage the wayward film, managed to re-assemble all the broken pieces and took over directing it.
So....bottom line time........does it really suck that bad?
Bottom line: It's no 'Chinatown', that's for sure. Trying to create a sequel to a film that's an acknowledged modern classic is doomed to disappoint. Great films come together, more often than not, by the unique circumstances and the unique convergence of particular people who create them......just at the right time and the right place.
But to answer the question.......no, by all means "The Two Jakes" does not suck. Taken on its own terms, you can think of it as "Chinatown-Lite".......less filling, but with a tang all its own.
Once again, Robert Towne spins a labyrinth of Los Angeles corruption that once again ensnares Jake Gittes in a murder conspiracy this time involving two distinctly dangerous and unstable women (played this time by Madeline Stowe and Meg Tilly).
As a director, Jack Nicholson lets the tale unfold at a slower pace than "Chinatown" and without the growing sense of dread that was Roman Polanski's specialty. Taking place a little over a decade after the first film's events, 1948 L.A. finds Jake Gittes older, heavier and still haunted by those corrosive final moments we all remember so well...........with Faye Dunaway's character shot dead and her 'daughter-sister' in the evil hands of her incestuous father.
Towne's intricate screenplay, meant to be the second of a trilogy details the new frontier of greed and corruption that L.A.'s robber barons have stuck their tentacles into.....oil. (In the first film, it was water.....). And somehow the case leads Gittes right back that long lost 'sister-daughter' he'd hoped to save and protect.
Though we can't jump up and down with wild praise for "The Two Jakes", we found it fascinating, ambitiously done and no surprise.given it's directed by an actor......filled to the brim with memorable performances.
It's certainly not the movie's fault that we avoided it all these years because its mere existence reminded us of the most terrible time in our life we ever experienced.......
Blockbuster Video is long gone, forgotten and in this media-crammed age of instant streaming of films, missed by no one. Good riddance. We'll never say that cursed name again.
As for "The Two Jakes"......don't avoid it. We give it a solid 3 stars (***) and say it's more than worth your time to check it out.......(but only after you've seen "Chinatown" first.)
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