‘Tis sequel time once more, that time of year when moviegoers are plagued with a seemingly endless spate of less-than-original Hollywood offerings (read: Sister Act 2, Addams Family Values, Beethoven’s 2nd, et al.). What a surprise, then, to find that WW2 is a competently directed, frequently hilarious, and charmingly subversive follow-up to what was already an above-par original. Wayne and Garth (Myers, Carvey) have graduated from Aurora High and are a tad unsure of their futures at this point. They still air their incendiary public access program, Wayne’s World, although they’ve relocated the studio to an abandoned doll factory in Aurora’s warehouse district. Nevertheless, it seems they’ve reached a creative impasse. This is solved one night when Jim Morrison and Oliver Stone’s Naked Indian Guy visit Wayne in a dream and urge him to put together a massive music festival — Waynestock, as it comes to be known — featuring Aerosmith, and whoever else Wayne can manage to book. Meanwhile, Wayne’s musician girlfriend (Carrere) is quickly developing a career of her own, under the tutelage of a thoroughly unctuous producer played by Christopher Walken. Subplots abound in WW2, not the least of which is man-child Garth’s eventual deflowering at the hands of Kim Basinger, and his emotional turnaround in the wake of his newfound manhood. The most genuinely funny bits, though, are the pop culture film and television parodies that crop up every 15 minutes: Batman, Mission: Impossible, Chinese kung fu films, the Village People, and, in a lengthy and thoroughly inspired comic re-enactment, the last quarter hour of The Graduate. Self-referential though it may be, WW2 is so packed with intelligent and occasionally surreal comic moments, you altogether manage to forget it’s a sequel to a movie that was based on a skit in the first place. Much of the film’s fluid hilarity can be credited to director Surjik, who helmed some of the very best sketches and films from Lorne Michaels’s The Kids in the Hall series. Surjik’s skewed Canadian vision keeps WW2 from descending to the level of Thanksgiving leftovers, with frequent touches of out-and-out weirdness and the sure-footed knowledge that this is a comedy, period. It doesn’t have to try to be anything more, and that, I think, is why it works so very well.
This article appears in December 10 • 1993 (Cover).