'The Second [Rate] Best Exotic Marigold Hotel'

We saw 'The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' on Monday afternoon.  The New York Times reported that in its first weekend, the movie attracted a large, mainly senior audience and Monday's crowd at the AMC Lincoln Square certainly confirmed that demographic.  The movie is directed by John Madden from a screenplay by Ol Parker.

Banner for 'The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel'

It stars Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Bill Nighy returning to their roles as British seniors who have settled into their waning years at The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a decrepit hotel in Jaipur, India owned and operated by Sonny Kapoor (Dev Patel).  Dame Judi's character (Evelyn Greenslade) becomes a buyer for a large fabric importer; Dame Maggie's character (Muriel Donnelly) has become the hotel's indispensable co-manager; Mr. Nighy's character (Douglas Ainsley) has become a tour guide (with the aid of a disarming local kid who feeds him information about the sites of Jaipur through an ear-piece because he is in the early stages of senility).  Evelyn and Douglas are having a chaste dalliance, although he is still married to Jean Ainsley (Penelope Wilton) who moved back to England at the end of the first film and returns to Jaipur seeking a divorce and armed with the one truly amusing line in the script (you've heard it in the trailers).

The film is set in motion by Sonny's desire to expand into an additional run-down property in Jaipur for which he needs backing from a San Diego company that runs a world-wide chain of retirement homes.  The head of the company tells Sonny and Muriel that he'll need to send an anonymous inspector to observe the operations of Sonny's current hotel before he can commit to finance the expansion.  The potential expansion subplot introduces three new characters played by David Strathairn, Richard Gere and Tamsin Greig (from 'Episodes' on Showtime) to the already crowded cast.

The acting company is stellar, but the writing is stale and the plot is fragmented into snippets of inconclusive, often incoherent, only occasionally amusing scenes -- like so many loose pieces of an unsolved jigsaw puzzle that the filmmakers have scattered about, but never bothered to assemble into a coherent picture.  The result is so confused that it leaves viewers feeling like they've slipped into senility during the course of the movie.