George of the Jungle II

First off, this film is really, really bad. Okay, I expected it to not match up to the first film, since few sequels do, and rarely does a movie that skips the theater and goes straight to video have much going for it. But this one took the prize. The jokes are contrived and overworked - in the first 20 minutes of the film, the same three jokes were recycled several times, and they stopped being funny after the first time they were told. And then there's Christopher Showerman's performance as the "new George". The film does have a few moments of fun with the Brendan Fraser lookalike's appearance in this film (including a jab that the studio was to cheap to hire the now-superstar Fraser for the sequel), and newcomer Showerman shows signs of being a fine actor in his own right. But he works way to hard trying to be Brendan Fraser, and the simple fact is, he isn't - no one is. Fraser brought a certain magic to the role the Showerman never manages to capture, no matter how much he may look or act like his predecessor. He'd have probably been easier to stomach had he tried to develop his own version of the character, the way Fraser managed to take the original cartoon character and make the part his own.

The other disappointment was Julie Benz. In interviews, Benz had said the reason she wanted to do this movie is because she wanted to do comedy. Benz is best known for playing the highly devious vampire Darla on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel", a role which most might think of as being highly dramatic. But there have been many moments where Benz got to show her comedic talents in that role; she has proven time and again in that role that she is an extremely talented actress with a remarkable sense of comedic timing and delivery. So I can only scratch my head as to what she was thinking when she agreed to play Ursula. This isn't a "funny" character, not even when Leslie Mann played her in the first film. Ursula is more the straight man; the funny stuff mostly went to George, or to Lyle (Thomas Haden Church, reprising from the first film) or an ape named Ape (voiced by Monty Python's John Cleese, also reprising from the first film). Benz spends most of this film just mooning over George or huffing over his antics, and wasting her ample acting talents as a result. Hopefully she will get the chance to prove she can do comedy, and this film (coupled with her work in sci-fi and horror films/shows) won't interfere with that opportunity.

Sad to say, I can't even recommend this movie to fans of any of the actors. Mostly, I spent the whole film simply embarrassed for Julie Benz, as well as for John Cleese, Thomas Haden Church, and for Christina Pickles, who takes over in the role of Beatrice, Ursula's mother (played by Holland Taylor in the first film).

In the end, I recommend you spend your money on something worthy, like perhaps the superior original George of the Jungle film.