A disappointing continuation.

Rating: 7/10 (22 June 2017)

Perhaps I just didn't pay enough attention while watching this second installment, but I though there was a lot lacking in this movie compared to the first Godfather. There were some good scenes and a few great lines, but as a whole there was not a lot contained in this story.
I liked the flashback at the end that showed how Michael has isolated himself from the rest of the family; it was a fitting cap to the events leading up to it. But otherwise I thought the story lacked direction. I got that Hyman Roth was an enemy, but the nature of his relationship with Michael and the Corleone empire was unclear to me. The plot as a whole for Michael's story line was just too hard to follow, and maybe that's because I just didn't do a good job watching it, but I paid pretty close attention the whole time and it still lost me at several points.
Vito's story line was more interesting to watch, and I actually would have preferred if the whole movie had centered on his rise to power in New York. DeNiro was well cast as the young Vito, though I don't know that he deserved an Oscar for his performance. I'm not sure if there was supposed to be a parallel between Michael's and Vito's stories, but if there was I couldn't see it. As seen in the first movie, Michael cares about keeping the family together in a very different way than Vito did, but I didn't see a lot of that here.
Overall though, it moved pretty slow and wasn't great to watch. Going back and reading the quotes page, there were scenes, lines, and characters that I had no memory of. There was just a different feel created between this and the first movie, which I did not like. Obviously a lot of people did because it's almost as highly touted as the original, but the characters just didn't seem as smart in this one. People like Fredo, Pentangeli, and even Hyman Roth brought the IQ down even for the more clever and ruthless characters like Michael and Tom Hagen.
It's not bad, it was just disappointing and makes me not want to see Part III. If you haven't seen this yet, I would think of this like a knock-off TV show to the original Godfather. It's the same world and has a lot of the same elements, but the two are loosely connected to the point that this second installment feels almost like a reboot that came out 20 years later as a sort of tribute to the original. Overall Rating: 7.2/10.