Sequel to The Absent Minded Professor isn't as much fun, in part because MacMurray had invented Flubber and got the girl, and any triumphs in this one inevitably won't be as satisfying.
They try to reheat ingredients by having the government tie up the development of flubber in red tape, which leads to some decent satire of the government. This is dropped though - MacMurray has to raise money for his greedy college and, more disappointingly, greedy wife. Nancy Olson didn't have much to do in the first - sit around and wish she was married and be pursued by Elliot Reid - but at least she was nice. Here she's worried about money all the time, agrees to take a fur coat as a bribe for persuading her husband to commercially exploit flubber, being stupidly jealous about some random woman getting Kirk, hanging out with Reid.
MacMurray then invents a device to control the weather but it's like, big deal, so what.
There's a repeat of the sequence where McMurray torments Reid ending up where a cop busts Reid - but it's not as fun here because MacMurray has been such a drip, refusing to let his wife work, not being able to get her any money. They repeat Ed Wynn coming back. And the device being used to help the college win a game (in this case football).
I didn't care about anyone in this version - MacMurray was absent minded last time but basically good but here he seems just dim. Olson isn't much better. The college doesn't deserve money - why should it stay open?
Keenan Wynn is good fun as Alonzo Hawk - I wish we'd seen more of him. Or maybe just that he'd been used better (the script isn't as tight).
Tommy Kirk brightens things as Wynn's son. His character has changed a bit from the first one - here he's helping out MacMurray and is a lot more nice (not that he was bad in the first film but here he actively opposes his dad). Mind you he still could have been cut out of the film, which is never a good sign.
There's a courtroom climax. But it just doesn't seem to work for me. The film has no heart. It needed a romance. They should have given MacMurray a niece to romance Kirk. You don't care about Olson and MacMurray.
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