Back to the Future Part II (1989)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Marty and Doc are at it again as the time-traveling duo head to 2015 to nip some McFly family woes in the bud. But things go awry thanks to bully Biff Tannen and a pesky sports almanac. In a last-ditch attempt to set things straight, Marty finds himself bound for 1955 and face to face with his teenage parents -- again.
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It's more like we're back in Pottersville in "It's a Wonderful Life."
What's missing is that wide-eyed innocence that set off the earlier Steven Spielberg sci-fi adventures, the emotional core of "E.T." and "Close Encounters," the ingenuousness of McFly in "Future I." Here, Marty is wide-eyed, but he's turned into a proto-Charles Bronson.
Since they flew off at the end of the first film, it is inescapable that there must be flying cars in the future, quite possibly the biggest cliché of futuristic stories (the only movie I can think of that made them seem anything other than implausible and distracting is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner).
As for the movies themselves, the 1985 original, in which Marty and Doc zoom 30 years back to 1955, remains the best; 1989's middle entry, in which the pair head, as noted, forward to 2015, is the most underrated (like fellow second child Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it had to contend with doltish charges of being too cold); and 1990's third entry, which blasted the two back to the Old West of 1885, is the most conventional.
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"Future II" is to "I" as "The Temple of Doom" was to "Raiders of the Lost Ark," good clean giggles gone sour and mumpish.