Oh no!!!!!!

Back to the Future: Part IV

With Michael J. Fox sadly unable to reprise his role as hyperactive time-travelling schoolboy Marty McFly due to health reasons, we join Christopher Lloyd (if, that is, producers can tear him away from his less-than-sterling work on the ‘Baby Geniuses ’ franchise) as he is working on a new time-travelling machine: this time, it’s a speedboat. Taking to the high seas, he travels back a mere 30 years to investigate the melting of the polar ice caps for an amusing paper he's researching. Yet, in the opening reel (which some critics will call ‘gutsy’, and others ‘plain barbaric’) the Doc is unceremoniously killed as his trusty vessel materialises in the middle of a trans-Atlantic shipping lane and he is crushed by an oil barge.

We then return to the present, where his two sons, Jules and Verne (played by the kids from ‘Superbad’) are working day shifts at Radio Shack. When their lunatic pops doesn’t return home that evening to give them their pre-bedtime lecture on advanced thermodynamics, the kids discover a slip of paper on his desk and decide to travel back in a prototype machine (more of a time tug-boat), to investigate where he might have gotten to. They accidentally go back too far (the nineteenth century to be exact), and find themselves becoming embroiled in the American slave trade. It turns out that the only way they can save their father is by creating a law that makes it illegal to sail across the Atlantic (and thus abolishing the slave trade). Bob Newhart to play William Wilberforce.

that sounds like an interesting Yawn.. I mean yarn

Are there any classics left that haven't been picked over and turned into a sequel? I think not - damn George Lucas.