Parent Trap II
This is one of those movies where if I tried to put into words how low my expectations were, it’d still be an understatement. I didn’t even know Hayley Mills had starred in the Parent Trap sequels until just recently; much less that there were three of them … I must have stopped even noticing let alone watching at part III, lol. Even knowing she was in it, I put it on purely because I knew it’d be an easy watch and I could get on with other things while it was on.
In short … it’s really corny, pretty much a retread of the same plot … but, hey, I wasn’t massively keen on the original so there was a lot of room for improvement; and frankly, though of course the Lindsay Lohan version is the one to see, I can see myself coming back to this one far more often than is probably healthy.
Though Hayley Mills somehow manages to look even older here mid-Eighties than she has recently in ITV’s “Wild at Heart” (which, incidentally, she’s so good in that she makes it worth watching), not to mention gagh! the accents … the two girls who set the traps this time around are if anything even more wonderful than she was in the original – I was about as surprised to see Carrie Kei Heim (Santa Claus: The Movie and very little else) as Mills’ daughter here as I was to see Tom Skerritt as the romantic interest, lol. I’m cuckoo when it comes to completely generic little girl activities and from the completely impossible marshmallow and jellybean cookie mix, to blowing bubblegum bubbles on the phone, to laying face down on the bed wiggling feet in the air while blasting the neighbourhood with Eighties sounds, this movie has it all. To say it won’t be to everyone’s taste would be understatement of the week, but for me it was a pleasant surprise and I can only hope the other two sequels are as fun.