Look Who's Talking Now! was received negatively by film critics,[2][3] and underperformed at the box office, grossing $10.3 million against a production budget of $22 million.[4][5]
Plot
Where the previous films were done from the perspective of human babies, the script is flipped when two dogs Trooper and Precious are in a fling. Puppies are a result and her owner decides to give them away; one day one puppy sees Mikey and Mollie walking by, Mollie rushes him onward, but the puppy catches his scent of cookies and dirt. He is taken by a pair of punks, but he manages to escape and becomes a stray dog. Meanwhile, James gets a job as a private jet pilot from Samantha, who seemingly has ulterior motives for him and keeps him extra busy and away from his home leaving Mollie to care after their children Mikey and Julie after she is laid off from her job in accounting. She gets a part time job as an elf for a mall Santa, and Mikey unexpectedly discovers that Santa is fake, destroying his belief in Santa Claus.
The puppy grows up wandering the streets and getting food from homeless men before getting caught and put into the pound. As a surprise one day James takes Mikey to the pound to pick out a dog for Christmas only to run into the puppy who is on his way to being destroyed after being there too long. They adopt him and name him "Rocks" because "that's what he left all over the back seat" of James' cab. Samantha, having also heard that Mikey wanted a dog brings in a pure breed poodle named Daphne for them. She is highly trained and looks down on Rocks the moment they meet. Having no choice, James and Mollie agree to have both dogs to not offend Samantha or take Rocks back to be destroyed. Rocks immediately gets the ire of Mollie by destroying her shoes and peeing in the house constantly. Eventually tired of Rocks, Daphne frames Rocks by chewing on a pair of Mollie's new shoes. She blows up at Rocks and tells him he is out, upsetting Mikey. Meanwhile James is called to work on Christmas Eve to fly Samantha to a private estate in northern New York and she effectively strands him there with her. Mollie, suspicious of Samantha gets her address and with the kids and dogs in tow, they head up to catch her, but Mollie crashes off the side of the road. Rocks, having picked up James' scent goes off to find him while Daphne, learning how to smell out people goes in search of rangers to help.
James catches onto Samantha's plan just as Rocks arrives, he pees on Samantha's leg and the two leave the house to find Molly and the others, not knowing Daphne had already gotten them rescued. They run into a pack of wolves and Rocks defends James, but the confrontation is ambiguous. Meanwhile, at the ranger station, Mikey sees who he thinks is Santa heading toward the station, but it turns out to be James. After a brief moment of worry that the wolves had destroyed his beeper, Rocks appears, apparently the pager sending the wolves off without harming either of them. The ranger turns on a broadcast from Santa on the radio, reigniting Mikey's belief in Santa Claus and Rocks is reinstated to the family for saving James from Samantha and the wolves.
Unlike the previous entries the family's children no longer include internal voices through voice actors, given that the character's were now older. Danny DeVito and Diane Keaton portray the Ubriaccos' dogs. This also marked the film debuts of Tabitha Lupien, and David Gallagher, best known for his later role as Simon Camden on 7th Heaven. Charles Barkley makes a cameo appearance as himself. George Segal, who portrayed Albert, the first film's antagonist and Mikey's biological father, reappears briefly in a dream sequence. Both Twink Caplan, who portrayed Mollie's best friend, Rona, in the previous two films, and Elias Koteas, who portrayed Mollie's brother, Stuart, in the second film, declined to return for this film. French singer Jordy performs, alongside David Gallagher, Tabitha Lupien, and other children, in a special music video for the film, titled It's Christmas, C'est Noel, from the album of Christmas, Potion Magique.
Release
The film was released domestically on November 5, 1993 before international distribution including the United Kingdom on May 27, 1994.[6]
Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 0% of 25 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Look Who's Talking Now: Look away."[7]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 26 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film one star out of four and remarked that "it looks like it was chucked up by an automatic screenwriting machine".[8]Gene Siskel gave the film zero stars and called it "an abysmal, embarrassing sequel".[9] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[10]
Dan Cox of Variety wrote: "Stretching a premise that one might say has gone to the dogs, Look Who's Talking Now runs feebly on the calculated steam of its forebears".[11] Rita Kempley of The Washington Post wrote: "Take the 'dle' out of 'poodle' and you've pretty much got the leitmotif of Look Who's Talking Now, a crude and mawkish film in which dogs attempt to communicate with Kirstie Alley and John Travolta".[12]
Stephen Holden of The New York Times was somewhat positive, writing that "the sound of stars mouthing the inner thoughts of dogs is somehow funnier than that of grownup actors doing wisecracking voice overs for gurgling infants".[13] Peter Rainer of the Los Angeles Times was also somewhat positive, calling the film "borderline pleasant" because Travolta and Alley "are a marvelous team".[14]
Leonard Maltin's film guide gave it two stars out of four, saying "the first one was cute, the second one was dreadful; this third entry in the series falls somewhere in between".[15]
Box office
Look Who's Talking Now! was a box-office bomb, only earning over $10 million against its $22 million budget, making it the lowest-grossing film in the series.[16][17] In its opening week, the film also faced stiff competition for an audience from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
^Rachlin, Jill (November 19, 1993). "Look Who's Talking Now!". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on November 11, 2023. Retrieved March 2, 2024.
