Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (May 4, 2022)
After Grease became a massive smash in 1978, did a sequel become inevitable? One would assume so, but given that the original wrapped up the characters’ stories with a fairly neat little bow, it seemed difficult to develop a logical story for Danny, Sandy and company.
By 1982, Paramount found an answer: move on without most of the original cast! Thus Grease 2 took us back to Rydell High for more musical adventures.
Set in 1961, Stephanie Zinone (Michelle Pfeiffer) leads a girl gang called the Pink Ladies, and she dates her counterpart Johnny Nogarelli (Adrian Zmed), the head member of the boy gang the T-Birds.
However, they split up, and a new romantic interest appears on Stephanie’s horizon when Michael Carrington (Maxwell Caulfield) – the straight-laced cousin of the original film’s good girl Sandy – enters the scene. Smitten with Stephanie, Michael needs to up his game and become the bad boy she desires.
Huh – that sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it? Not unlike the plot to the 1978 movie but with gender reversal, doesn’t it?
Probably because that essentially becomes what we see with Grease 2. It brings a rehash of the prior flick but with a nice boy and a tough girl rather than an innocent girl and a rough boy.
Perhaps the redundant feel of this plot would bother less if Grease 2 did anything interesting with it. Alas, the film just seems like a wholly uninspired semi-remake.
“Plot” should appear in quotes since Grease 2 comes more with themes than actual story beats. Sure, we follow the Michael/Stephanie narrative, but those moments feel less important here than the Sandy/Danny tale in the prior movie.
Instead, Grease 2 burdens itself with a mix of other subplots that feel like padding. Granted, the original came with more than a few semi-unnecessary detours as well, but at least those felt more connected to the main Danny/Sandy thread.
Here we wind up with lots of scenes that seem tangential at best and irrelevant at worst. For instance, whereas the “big dance” in Grease mostly existed as an excuse for a long production number, it still advanced the Danny/Sandy relationship and added complications.
Grease 2 uses a talent show for similar purposes, but it comes across as largely irrelevant to any true narrative momentum. It also seems perplexing in terms of the characters, as it feels bizarre that the tough Pink Ladies would decide to put on a cutesy holiday-themed song and dance number.
Little about Grease 2 makes a lick of sense, what with thin characters as well as scenes that clearly exist for Big Production Numbers and nothing else. Why do the characters love to bowl? So we can get a bizarre “showstopper” set at an alley, of course!
Hoo boy does Grease 2 love its borderline insane musical sequences. We get cringy material like a smirking song in Science about the reproduction of flowers, and poor Pfeiffer looks ready to quit Hollywood when stuck with the embarrassing “Cool Rider” tune.
Whereas the original film came with a slew of memorable songs, the tracks in Grease 2 range from mediocre to yikes, with more on the latter side. Sometimes it feels like the composers set out to write the worst possible songs – and they succeeded.
Try as I might, I can’t find a single redeeming factor with Grease 2. An embarrassment for all involved, it presents a total catastrophe.
