Based on a sketch from All That (Nickelodeon’s kid-equivalent Saturday Night Live), the original 1997 Good Burger echoed its grown-up equivalents that sprung from successful SNL gags, characters, or performers. Like the Corky Romanos of the world, Good Burger offered up piping hot performers (Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell) doing their successful schtick in a much bigger form, bolstered by ridiculous slapstick, a radio-ready soundtrack and tons of famous pals. It wasn’t very good, but then, none of the movies following this recipe were. Good Burger 2 follows a different still-stale formula, copied from the new flavor-of-the-week cookbook: Legacyquels. It brings back the old plot, old jokes, old songs and old, old actors for a straight-to-streaming cash grab. Good Burger 2 isn’t simply junk food. It is a petrified Happy Meal buried in the back of your childhood closet, reheated in the microwave. Good Burger 2 will give the most nostalgic customer food poisoning—and it’s the worst thing to happen to Less Than Jake since white-guy dreadlocks.
I bring up that band not just to further date the franchise, but because Good Burger 2 has its characters recite Less Than Jake’s collaboration with Mitchell for the first movie, “We’re All Dudes,” about a dozen times—including a lip-synced credits remix. When the entire aesthetic foundation of a movie 2023 is ska, maybe it’s time to pack it up, pack it up, pack it up.
Aside from the music, Good Burger 2 can at least boast participant loyalty among its positive qualities. Thompson and Mitchell return as Dex and Ed, plenty of supporting characters pop their heads up, and it was all put together by writers Kevin Kopelow and Heath Seifert, the original team that made the leap from All That to the big screen with the first film. At least shamed Nickelodeon creative Dan Schneider has been scrubbed from the production.
In fact, so much is the same that Good Burger 2 falls into the trap of so many legacyquels, in that the lack of a logical intended audience is apparent in the flailing script. There are some zany pieces of absurdity, but they’re merely side dishes to the repetitive, replicative entrée. The comedy finds itself paralyzed with contradictory intentions: The jokes have the silliness and inanity usually aimed at kids, but also the just-coasting-by laziness of a franchise installment that assumes it’ll get a pass from the 30-somethings who recognize its routine. It’s why Moonlight’s Alex R. Hibbert does Ed’s raspy voice (and old jokes) as Ed’s son, Ed 2, who is somehow not the main character—or even a character. It’s why there are so many moments where the only punchline is “Did you see that old Nick star?” Sure, Lori Beth Denberg’s Connie Muldoon stops by, but there’s nothing actually written for her in the script except the sidenote “Can we get Lori Beth Denberg back for an afternoon?”
Some of these gags spotlight the cognitive dissonance of making a kids’ movie for nostalgic adults. Resurrecting the stunt casting of Carmen Electra (She’s a nun! She posed for Playboy in the ‘90s but now she’s a nun! Ha ha!) is more likely to result in a series of uncomfortable questions than a chuckle. But plenty of people came back, possibly because Brian Robbins, the first film’s director, is now CEO of Paramount Pictures. In fact, that might explain a lot about this Paramount+ movie. Robbins left directing duties this time around to Phil Traill, best known for the destructively bad Sandra Bullock comedy All About Steve, but Robbins’ string-pulling is still felt in the amount of half-hearted Hollywood support sprinkled throughout the film.
Usually celebrity cameos are not obtained by movies using the Cameo app, but Good Burger 2’s “We Are the World” parody (a reference that would’ve been dated in the first movie) is stitched together from the front-facing camera footage of actors in their backyards and cars—their names emblazoned beneath them so that you don’t have to Google “Was that Danny Tamberelli?” It’s heartening to know that Andy Samberg took a few seconds out of his day to half-sing a little song behind his house, and probably only charged the production $150.
That’s good, because there doesn’t seem like there was much budget to go around. Much like this year’s White Men Can’t Jump, Good Burger 2 looks like it was mostly shot on brightly lit, overused sitcom sets and at a series of Good Burger-themed promotional block parties. Extras stand around unconvincingly in various parking lots, ready to dance to whichever musician was trending on Twitter at the time of the shoot. There are hardly any characters to speak of, and barely any interaction between them (making a shoehorned romance subplot especially grating). Basically, Thompson and Mitchell have to carry this thing on their shoulders, and, pros as they are, it’s a task that’s only gotten more daunting since they were 20.
Good Burger 2 returns to the David and Goliath plot of the original, strung together with painful humor and physical idiocy (something Mitchell is, at least, very good at). Dex is still a little weasel, whose financial indiscretions, deadbeat ways and poor entrepreneurial ideas have estranged all his friends and family—except his first victim, the happy-go-lucky Ed. Dex’s greed leads Ed to do the most dangerous thing you can do in a kids’ comedy (or comedy for stunted adults): Sign a contract without reading it.
Naturally this leads to the fate of the Good Burger restaurant on the line, and with a new high-tech corporate powerhouse (led by Jillian Bell, playing a relative of Good Burger’s villain because why not) looking to exploit all that is human about the scrappy greasetrap. Like so many films in the IP Era, Good Burger 2 shoves everyone and everything right back into place for a quick paycheck—a feature-length Comic-Con panel, shot at 24 photo-ops per second.
The only thing Kopelow and Seifert modernize is an exhausted “automation replacing workers” theme that serendipitously connects to the current threat facing writers, actors…and pretty much everyone else. This allows Mitchell to goof off as a robotic version of himself and for the writers to make a couple jabs at AI. After a long, painful strike from writers and actors trying to protect themselves from tech bros promising magic algorithmic fix-its and the copy-pasting of likenesses, it’s a relevant touch.
As much as I love to see a kids’ movie instill a healthy mistrust of the technology pushed by big business, it’s an ironic message from a film as crassly capitalist as Good Burger 2. It’s a template filled out during a long weekend; the person who worked hardest was the coordinator wrangling everyone’s schedules. It milks nostalgia for all it’s worth, then realizes that’s not enough, and shores up its balance sheet with plenty of product placement. Aside from including a fake trailer for a sponsored movie, there are also scenes where, for example, an in-focus security guard will conspicuously munch on a full, brightly-branded bag of snacks in the background. Even when it’s not selling its past self, Good Burger 2 is selling something. It’s what makes it a hard movie to root for, even when it lucks into saying the right things: It tosses one money-grubbing trend in the trash while ordering all the others directly off the menu.
Director: Phil Traill
Writer: Kevin Kopelow, Heath Seifert
Starring: Kenan Thompson, Kel Mitchell, Jillian Bell
Release Date: November 22, 2023 (Paramount+)
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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