Homeward Bound II

 While certainly not a bad film, this slacks the heart and charm of its predecessor. Shadow, the older dog, was almost certainly an afterthought to the plot, but in the previous film he was a crucial older mentor figure. Sassy, the cat character, it's just mean and not sassy anymore. The animals have gone through a traumatic experience in the first film, and the Chance character has been traumatized by an experience in a pound, and yet the cat character brings this up quite often to him as a kind of joke which seems really mean and not something a friend would do. The first film was an adventure through a wilderness, and this one is the trite idea that the city is an urban wilderness. The film is set in San Francisco, but there seem to be packs of feral dogs running around in the city. This seems to be a tad unrealistic, but is a feature of many films in which there are talking animals. The American city with the biggest problem with stray dogs is Detroit with 5,000 in 2023, so we can probably assume that the figures were lower when this movie came out, so there probably were maybe 200 stray dogs or something like that in San Francisco at the time, and they meet 10 of them. That is a slightly small thing to criticize about this movie. My biggest criticism of the movie is that they made it at all honestly, apart from that my biggest criticism is that in this movie the dogs can understand human beings. In the first movie a large part of the plot is driven by the fact that the dogs do not understand exactly what the human beings are talking about, and they think that they have been abandoned. Makes sense right? But in this movie they understand things that the humans say, so why did they misunderstand where they were going when they went to the airport? It doesn't make any sense at all. On top of that, there is a completely superfluous love story between Chance and another dog, and Chance says something like my humans will love you because I love you. Which you might think makes sense until you realize that his love interest is a stray dog who has never had any owner so has never had a bath in its life and lives in an urban environment so no dips into rivers or ponds or anything, and so must be infected with a lot of insects and other dog diseases. Very cute.

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