Roger Ebert appeared disliked this film because of its loosely-jointed subplots. That actually isn't really the problem with the movie, though, as it is more introspection and characterization, and for what it's worth, does a pretty good job with that. However, it is true that there is a lack of the kind of character evolution we saw in the first movie.
And part of that has to do with the characterization of Maggie, Vada's mother, the key albeit absent persona in this story. Since almost nothing was revealed of Vada's mother in the first movie, the writers seemed to think themselves free to do whatever they liked, but the character they created is so completely and obviously contrived and retrofitted that it destroys any credibility this film has and makes it difficult to reach the end.
Let's start with the simple, obvious continuity errors. In the original film, Harry Sultenfuss indicated, when his daughter was 11 1/2, that he had not been on a date in 20 years. Yet in this movie, he indicates to Veda that he met her mother and "proposed to her on the second date; two weeks later, we were married; almost nine months later, you were here and she was gone." So that would have made his last date at most about 13 years prior to his 20-year assertion, assuming he never had a date with his wife while they were married. Since, speaking on the order of a few decades, rounding to scores of years seems just a bit overkill, I'm going to have to call the writers' bluff on this one.
Also, Maggie, as shown in pictures here, looks more like a wannabe Marilyn Monroe than the pretty but somewhat frumpily-dressed young lady we saw beside Harry Sultenfuss in the first film.
And this little gaffe points to character problems that are not so much continuity-related as thematic. Maggie was an aspiring actress born and raised in Los Angeles who frequented hipsters, walked out in protest over Senator Joseph McCarthy and first married in New York City... and somehow she ended up in bucolic heartland Pennsylvania married to a forensic anthropologist. A conversation toward the end of this movie does suggest that she was undergoing a personal evolution and wanted a life that was a bit more grounded and down-to-Earth than what one would find in Hollywood, so perhaps that isn't so implausible.
One problem. The tone of the movie, with regard to its treatment of particular subject matters, is decidedly anti-McCarthy and even anti-Nixon. It is not that one can never be both pro-family/pro-rural/pro-heartland/pro-religion and anti-G.O.P., but when the foils happen to be lefty New Age hipster types, as they most certainly are here, that sort of juxtaposition is more than a little disjointed. (Oh, and the proud Young Republican McCarthyite cop pushing bogus charges against a discreet man for the sake of the snot-nosed kid of a non-famous chick he apparently despised anyway? That was too much.)
Unplanned sequels are tricky things. One has already largely resolved the conflicts from the first movie, and retroactively locating the points where the story and characters remain sufficiently open for further conflict and development is not easy. In this instance, the writers may or may not have done their best, but the result, notwithstanding the charm Vada and her family still exude (Nick, however, cannot hold a candle to Thomas J. in terms of personality), looks like just another artificial packaged product capitalizing on a good brand name. (On that note, conveniently, the conclusion of the previous movie left the authors with a logical narrative reason for not paying Macaulay Culkin's salary, which would doubtlessly have been astronomical by this point.)
A final slice of food for thought. It is not that older films never strained plausibility, but to the extent that they did, they usually didn't try to take themselves so seriously as to pretend to hyper-realism. I think this is one reason why one must wade through newer films so much more tediously to find good ones, and why contemporary cinema could stand to take a lesson or two from the theater.
And part of that has to do with the characterization of Maggie, Vada's mother, the key albeit absent persona in this story. Since almost nothing was revealed of Vada's mother in the first movie, the writers seemed to think themselves free to do whatever they liked, but the character they created is so completely and obviously contrived and retrofitted that it destroys any credibility this film has and makes it difficult to reach the end.
Let's start with the simple, obvious continuity errors. In the original film, Harry Sultenfuss indicated, when his daughter was 11 1/2, that he had not been on a date in 20 years. Yet in this movie, he indicates to Veda that he met her mother and "proposed to her on the second date; two weeks later, we were married; almost nine months later, you were here and she was gone." So that would have made his last date at most about 13 years prior to his 20-year assertion, assuming he never had a date with his wife while they were married. Since, speaking on the order of a few decades, rounding to scores of years seems just a bit overkill, I'm going to have to call the writers' bluff on this one.
Also, Maggie, as shown in pictures here, looks more like a wannabe Marilyn Monroe than the pretty but somewhat frumpily-dressed young lady we saw beside Harry Sultenfuss in the first film.
And this little gaffe points to character problems that are not so much continuity-related as thematic. Maggie was an aspiring actress born and raised in Los Angeles who frequented hipsters, walked out in protest over Senator Joseph McCarthy and first married in New York City... and somehow she ended up in bucolic heartland Pennsylvania married to a forensic anthropologist. A conversation toward the end of this movie does suggest that she was undergoing a personal evolution and wanted a life that was a bit more grounded and down-to-Earth than what one would find in Hollywood, so perhaps that isn't so implausible.
One problem. The tone of the movie, with regard to its treatment of particular subject matters, is decidedly anti-McCarthy and even anti-Nixon. It is not that one can never be both pro-family/pro-rural/pro-heartland/pro-religion and anti-G.O.P., but when the foils happen to be lefty New Age hipster types, as they most certainly are here, that sort of juxtaposition is more than a little disjointed. (Oh, and the proud Young Republican McCarthyite cop pushing bogus charges against a discreet man for the sake of the snot-nosed kid of a non-famous chick he apparently despised anyway? That was too much.)
Unplanned sequels are tricky things. One has already largely resolved the conflicts from the first movie, and retroactively locating the points where the story and characters remain sufficiently open for further conflict and development is not easy. In this instance, the writers may or may not have done their best, but the result, notwithstanding the charm Vada and her family still exude (Nick, however, cannot hold a candle to Thomas J. in terms of personality), looks like just another artificial packaged product capitalizing on a good brand name. (On that note, conveniently, the conclusion of the previous movie left the authors with a logical narrative reason for not paying Macaulay Culkin's salary, which would doubtlessly have been astronomical by this point.)
A final slice of food for thought. It is not that older films never strained plausibility, but to the extent that they did, they usually didn't try to take themselves so seriously as to pretend to hyper-realism. I think this is one reason why one must wade through newer films so much more tediously to find good ones, and why contemporary cinema could stand to take a lesson or two from the theater.