The Two Jakes (1990)

Wow! Such a good movie.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The Two Jakes has the misfortune of following an absolutely exceptional original in Chinatown. Few sequels live up the original and one can only wonder at how different, and presumably better it would have been if Polanski had directed again. This is not a bad movie.It was nice to see the character of Jake Gittes again. It does have its moments of private eye noir and intrigue. Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel are always fascinating to watch. Some of the action and word play is really enjoyable. Unfortunately it has no rhythm. The plot is long winded, confused and tentative. On too many occasion's I felt my interest waning. However I decided to see it through and felt the pace gather a bit towards the end. The acting is good and there's enough in it to keep it fairly interesting, but at times I felt like I was just hanging in there watching and hoping for it to become great, which it never does. If someone asked me to explain what happened in the film I think I would actually struggle to make sense of it. Nicholson and Keitel make it watchable, but not memorable. It's not not great because Chinatown was so good. It's just not great full stop. It was an average sequel. Not the first and certainly won't be the last...

Jack Nicholson deserves a lion's share of the credit for bringing the belated sequel to Roman Polanski's 'Chinatown' to the big screen, putting heroic effort into a project that never had much hope of matching the original. Comparison is of course always the cheapest form of criticism, but it's hard not to notice the holes in a cast substituting Harvey Keitel and Meg Tilly (an unconvincing femme fatale) for John Huston and Faye Dunaway, and Nicholson himself proves to be an only adequate director (under duress, to be sure).Robert Towne's incredibly convoluted plot, involving oil swindles and real estate grabs in post-war Los Angeles, is only a shadow of his earlier, Oscar winning effort, with all the hard-boiled gumshoe narration added strictly for mood when it should have been used for clarification (viewers will sympathize with Jake Gittes when he's told, "you may think you know what's going on around here, but you don't.") Cameo roles (like oil magnate Richard Farnsworth) should have been major characters; some of the major characters (nymphomaniac widow Madeleine Stowe) should have been walk-ons; and the essential film noir villain (the other Jake, played by Keitel) ends up as a tragic hero.The timing of the production was likewise all wrong, arriving after a decade of dumbed-down FX spectacles had made any notion of ambivalence all but extinct in a Hollywood drama. Perhaps the kindest thing to be said about the film is that it reinforces the classic status of the original.

...of course i don't mean Jack Nicholson, he brings his A game to just about everything he does. This one was rather dull IMO. It just didn't have any pop. The story throughout just didn't have any wow moments like Chinatown did.Now for the miscasting. Harvey Keitel's tough guy persona just didn't work in this one. Richard Farnsworth was odd as a choice for the demon oil man and to round it out, If Meg Tilly wasn't miscast, then the casting agent was either sick that day, deaf or dead on blind. She's never been one to hit the Hollywood signs for popularity or bring in the crowds so for her to be in this was just a last minute choice or a bad choice.A little about this being too long. For something to carry on for 2 hrs and 37 minutes and slowly dribble out bits and pieces with bad casting and and average screenplay(watch for a few brief, has nothing to do with scenes with the PI's supposed wife. Didn't belong in the movie), I was just waiting for the end to say I actually finished it.I recommend anyone who's seen Chinatown to finish it off and watch this but if you haven't and aren't planning on seeing it, you aren't missing anything by skipping this one .BTW...is it me or could anyone else see Nicholson having a recurring character as a PI in some movies nowadays? He hasn't had a hit in a while, he could do more of these as his character in this. I could see it working.

Knowing this Chinatown sequel's detested reputation, I was too interested in seeing a movie directed by Jack Nicholson to turn away. I was surprised to find that it is very under-appreciated. Nicholson is quite an inventive, if a little show-offy, director. His confident helming of the very late sequel to a highly revered contemporary classic is full of interesting shots and his performance realistically portrays an older, wiser Jake Gittes who has been seasoned with philosophies on the pain and importance of the past.It is not simply on account of Nicholson. Robert Towne's own continuation of his predecessor is quite creative. Harvey Keitel plays the second Jake, who has hired the initial Jake to catch his wife cheating on him red-handed. In the course of the sting, Keitel up and shoots the adulterous lover, who turns out to be his real estate partner. Nicholson is now under intense scrutiny for his unwitting part in the crime and has to figure out if it was justifiable homicide or straight murder. The case proceeds to elude to California's booming oil industry as well as his own past after he stumbles upon a wire recording during the investigation that mentions the daughter of Faye Dunaway's ill-fated character in the last film.The Two Jakes, to me, can stand on its own with Chinatown. Polanski directed the first film much much differently than Nicholson addresses this follow-up. I don't believe in the case of Chinatown a sequel needs to be a comparable continuation. Making a second installment sixteen years later allows a lot of license for it to be its own beast. Some such sequels done that way are disasters. The Two Jakes stays afloat. And Madeleine Stowe remains the most insatiably attractive woman of any superlative comment that I've made within the past month, at least. And I've made a lot.The film's theatrical trailer is actually incredible. It's narrated by Gittes, telling us how the war was good for Los Angeles in so many different ways that contribute to his business, as extremely dry bits of humor throughout the film punctuate it here and there and provocative, often voyeuristic shots from the movie are included.