NEIL SIMON'S THE ODD COUPLE II

• Starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau.
• Directed by Howard Deutch.
• Rated PG-13, with strong profanity; running time 96 minutes
• With 10 as a must-see, Jack gives this film a 7

By Jack Garner
Staff film critic

(April 10, 1998) -- After slumming as Felix and Oscar clones in two Grumpy Old Men movies and Men at Sea, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are back as the real deal in a long-overdue sequel to The Odd Couple.

The original writer also is along for the ride. You can tell because his famous name is stuck in the movie's official title: Neil Simon's The Odd Couple II.

Although the results fall short of the immensely popular 1968 original, The Odd Couple II recaptures enough of Simon's marvelous mismatched misfits to justify this encore appearance.

In The Odd Couple II, the slovenly Oscar lives in retirement in Sarasota, Fla., where he watches Grapefruit League baseball and plays cards with fellow retirees.

In a bow to the liberated '90s, the all-male poker game is now a mostly female enterprise. Or that may simply mean a lot of the guys are dead.

The obsessive Felix, meanwhile, has scared away a series of wives with his fastidious habits, and lives alone up north. He hasn't seen his former roommate in 17 years.

But then Oscar's son (Jonathan Silverman) announces he's getting married in southern California, and the bride-to-be is none other than Felix's daughter (Lisa Waltz). Thus, Oscar and Felix are invited to the same affair.

They meet at the Los Angeles airport, rent a car and share a bizarre, haphazard road trip en route to their children's wedding.

Along the way, they have a flirtatious encounter with two biker babes (filling the comic-romance function of the Pigeon sisters from the original play and film). They're played with vivacious gusto by Christine Baranski and Jean Smart.

Though the new Odd Couple leans more on silly slapstick, Simon contributes the witty repartee and amusing observations we've come to expect from America's most successful comedy playwright.

The writing shows the facile polish and amusingly contrived style typical of Simon's earlier work, before his scripts took on a more seriously autobiographical tone. It's more Sunshine Boys and Barefoot in the Park than Brighton Beach Memoirs or Biloxi Blues.

Howard Deutch's direction is modest and unobtrusive, and it certainly helps that the lines are delivered by seasoned pros Lemmon, 73, and Matthau, 77.

Matthau, in particular, remains an astonishing comic screen presence. Each time I watch him work, I'm drawn into his hang-dawg expressions, his shuffling gait, his eccentric hand gestures and his flamboyant way with a line of dialogue. There's nobody like him -- and the encroachment of age humorously exaggerates his comic style.

Matthau may be the most underrated comic actor in the whole span of American movies. I can't recall a single Matthau performance in any film since first seeing him 40 years ago that wasn't inherently entertaining.

Oscar Madison is one of his most memorable creations, a magnficent mess of a man and the perfect foil for the supercilious Felix Ungar, or, as Oscar calls him, "the human vacuum cleaner."

So even if The Odd Couple II is a mere echo of the original, it's an echo worth catching.