An absolutely great sequel - NOT!

Rating: 4/10 (5 February 2000)

As a huge fan of the original Godfather, I have never understood all the hoopla about this film. A great continuation of the story? The only sequel to be better than the original? No way, on both counts - not by a long shot.
First of all, The Godfather is a movie that truly needs no sequel. When that door closes on Kay at the end, that's it - an entire cycle has played out: power has been passed on, the new guard has superseded the old, evil has corrupted goodness and the sins of the father have come back to feast upon the sons. It is a perfect story, complete in itself and suggestive of all that is to come. Anything you could add would only be elaboration, nothing genuinely new. As such, there's nothing - not one single thing - which happens in The Godfather Part II that is not either already implied in the first movie or at least could be predicted by knowing the first movie. Therefore, the story just doesn't feel fresh; it feels more like a "standard" sequel - that is, one done just for the money, to capitalize on the series while it was hot. (The true greatest sequel of all time, of course, is The Empire Strikes Back - superceding the original in so many ways and on so many levels it's unbelievable.)
Now, I'll concede there's an awful lot of artistry on display in this movie - the acting is all great, the cinematography and production design, etc. It certainly doesn't have the *look* of a quickie re-hash. And you can tell that considerable time and effort has gone into the story and in the structuring of the movie. Which makes its failure all the more troubling to watch. First of all, the cross-cutting between the two time periods (Vito Corleone in the early part of the century and Michael in the late '50s) just DOES NOT WORK. I'll challenge anybody on this point; if you think it's a good idea, you're just WRONG! I can half see what Coppola had in mind here, but it's just annoying. First off, the two sequences are not equally weighted - we see far more of the "modern day" Michael segment - and so the Vito scenes come to feel more like an intrusion, a break up of the momentum of the real movie, rather than as a legitimate sequence in its own right. And frankly, it's not a legitimate sequence anyway - it's far too bathed in quaintness and romanticism, it never truly takes Vito to task for the life he has chosen; in fact, it doesn't even give us a good sense of why he has chosen that life. Except for the brief murder scenes, it mostly portrays Vito as a hero - a Robin Hood of the people - and does not give a clear picture of the ruthlessness and cold-bloodedness he would have needed to build up his empire. (For a good portrait of this side of the young Vito, read the chapter in the original Godfather book by Mario Puzo which focuses upon his rise to power. Compare this sequence to the movie's in order to see just how much Coppola has omitted and how much he has romanticized what he's kept.)
Coppola wants to save all his rage and condemnation for Michael, you see - almost as if the Corleone crime family was kind of a Mom and Pop store started by the old man in the good old days, and was great and wonderful until the young whippersnapper came in with all of his newfangled ways and started screwing everything up. If Michael's soul is shown as corroded by the end of the movie, why is Vito not assessed in the same harsh way? After all, if not for him, his son would never have been put in this position in the first place. Curiously, Michael's attempts to "go legitimate" are portrayed as the real horror here, which is certainly an interesting idea, but I think this is a theme much better developed in The Godfather Part III, where the agent of legitimacy becomes the Church (the Vatican), making for a much richer and headier mix. Here, Michael's mainly trying to buy into resorts and casinos in Cuba. How interesting is that?
Finally, this picture moves sooooo slowly and takes so much time to tell its story (er, stories) that it becomes sleep-inducing. Not enough of import happens here for the story to take as long as it does. In short, The Godfather Part II is a film with an inflated sense of its own importance; the wonder is that it has suckered so many millions of people into buying into it. The Godfather is a movie which truly needs no sequel, but if you feel compelled to see one, rent Part III and skip over this tired and pretentious mess.