In 18th century Jaipur, Maharaja Jai Singh II employed the finest architects in India to create a pleasure palace that celebrated his greatest love: astronomy. Thus he unwittingly provided a most appropriate backdrop for John Madden’s “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” whose cast is ancient, but stellar.
The shocking $137 million box office take of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” assured us that there would be a “second” visit to the Pink City.
It’s one more franchise, stuffed with actors as furious (if not as fast) as those in the Vin Diesel vehicles.
Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith and a passel of other British character actors return to their post-Colonial stomping grounds and exchange withering greetings like, “you’re still in one slightly sagging piece” (part of screenwriter Ol Parker’s overreliance on gags about death).
Tom Wilkinson left the original “Hotel” feet first and the downgrade to Richard Gere is severe. At his first entrance a fellow guest says in sotto voce “Lord have mercy on my ovaries.” Blessedly, He does but even by Hollywood standards, the new man makes an implausible first-time novelist.
The film unwisely shunts budding entrepreneuse Maggie Smith to a secondary role to make more room for Dev Patel’s hotelier, who resembles M. Hulot in slapstick pratfalls but sadly not in muteness. His shtick of manic malapropisms cannot save a thin plotline about hotel expansion.
They say old age turns us young again and so the Marigold is like a sitcom high school, filled with lust, betrayals, bed-hopping, hasty reconciliations, surprising part-time jobs and morning roll call.
The touching, unrequited relationship between Dench and Nighy is much finer than the farcical gamboling around them, which culminates with Gere front and center in a cathartic, Bollywood-inspired rump-shaker (spoiler alert: he’s no damp-Pierce-Brosnan-in-”Mamma-Mia!”).
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“The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated PG and running time is 2:02. Visit cinemawest.com.
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