Review of Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993) by Rachel M — 14 May 2011

The first Sister Act had a pretty ropey plot, kept afloat by energetic execution. Sister Act 2 swaps one old dog for another, but doesn't keep up the pace. There's virtually nothing to it but the familiar beats of cliche, with none of the first film's good bits propping them up.

Doloris (Goldberg) must pretend to be a nun again in order to help an unruly music class in a troubled school. That's a fairly thin premise, this time set against a ludicrously weak antagonist: James Coburn is Mr Crisp, a higher-up at the school who thinks it should close and wants to apply for early retirement. Early retirement! The swine! A mob gangster he is not.

There's no real antagonism at all until the end, when our heroic music class attends a battle of the bands type thing, with Mr Crisp in tow hoping to, um, stop them or something. His struggle is as exciting and surprising as that of the music class, who firstly all get along just fine, and secondly are so clearly going to win the competition that the movie doesn't bother to keep us waiting. Tension, schmension. And the winner is!

There are two montages, which ought to tell you something. Instead of the last film's fantastic mix of gospel and '60s music, we're mostly stuck with a lot of pouty '90s R'n'B, and plenty of rap. Rap is just one of the ways Sister Act 2 tries to be down with the kids. The dialogue contains an embarrassing amount of "whack" and "dope", and all the hood cliches look even more embarrassing two decades later.

It's not much of a sequel, because although the last film's nuns are all present and correct, they barely have any input, or even lines. Somehow even Whoopi Goldberg feels superfluous at times, possibly because her character is really nothing like it was last time, not least because she keeps doing some bizarre impression of Malcolm X, or something. Overall this shows suspicious signs of an unused screenplay reworked into a sequel by just changing a few of the names.

Sister Act 2 is much too worried about its simperingly cool whack/dope misfits to actually be funny, and it's a long hour and a half because of this, although the dumb characterisation and curious editing are also to blame. It's not terrible, but it should probably be avoided, as it's one of those dud sequels that threatens to eat up all your happy memories of the first film. Some habits are meant to be kicked.