George of the Jungle 2 Reviews

Fans who chuckled at Disney's goofy, live-action adventures of Jay Ward's dim-witted cartoon jungle man will find less to love in this sequel. George of the Jungle (Christopher Showerman, taking over from the first film's Brendan Fraser) just wants to spends some quality time with his wife, Ursula (Julie Benz, replacing Leslie Mann), and their son, George Jr. (Angus T. Jones), but people and four-legged people keep interrupting. First, the Mean Lion (voice of Michael Clarke Duncan) stirs up the animal kingdom with hints that George has been neglecting his kingly duties in favor of domestic bliss. Then Ursula's mother, Beatrice Stanhope (Christina Pickles, in lieu of Holland Taylor), cooks up a scheme to lure her daughter back to civilization that involves recruiting Ursula's former fiance, Lyle van der Groot (Thomas Haden Church), to call attention to George's uncouth ways. While George battles to hang onto his home and his position in Africa, his chief advisor, Ape (voice of John Cleese), has been sidetracked by gambling fever in Las Vegas. Beatrice orders Lyle to sucker Ape into a high stakes poker game; if Lyle wins the deed to Ape Mountain, Beatrice can evict George from his jungle paradise. George and his family head for Vegas to drag Ape home and Beatrice discovers that it's actually George who has the deed. Beatrice schemes to dupe her doofus son-in-law out of it and even stoops so low as to pay a stage hypnotist to bewitch Ursula into forgetting George! Dismayed by Ursula's amnesia, George is absent when Beatrice's bulldozers plow through the jungle. Can George rebound before Mean Lion supplants him and Beatrice turns his home into a safari theme park? Showerman looks good in a loincloth but lacks Fraser’s comic timing, and neither his co-stars nor director David Grossman can summon up the charm of Ward's loopy George of the Jungle cartoons, though Ape’s glitzy Vegas debut comes close.