Return of the Secaucus Seven begins with a shot of a man doing a half hearted job of plunging a filthy toilet, and goes down hill from there. Only desperately insecure ex-hippies or their sycophants could praise this very poorly made and unimaginative work. Nothing against writer/director John Sayles, he is excellent ... but not on this film.
I'm just trying to be realistic here for anyone looking for an unbiased opinion. Sayles was 28 or 29 at the time he made this and it was his first film, made by novices on a shoe string budget. Seriously now, how good could it be? Yet it is not the low budget feel that bothers me about this film, although it is quite annoying with it's monkey camera operators, stag film bad lighting and camcorder like sound. It is not the wooden and forced acting on the part of it's inexperienced cast, who, I am not saying is amateur, but every time they would speak their eyes would roll back in their head and the rest of the cast would mouth the line along with them. It was not the unattractive boring cast whose idea of an interesting character choice is singing like Dan Fogelberg on ludes or doing bad impressions of Humphrey Bogart. No, the thing that is really annoying about this film is it's tedious and pretentious script. To think that anyone would be interested in watching a film about a group of uninteresting unmarried unscrupulous 30 year olds kvetching about life as they jump from bed to bed is pretty cocky on the part of the author. If you are not going to have an interesting storyline, you had better have some damn good dialog, like in Diner or Manhattan, or at least an interesting character like in Yojimbo or The Good The Bad and The Ugly, or even Creature From the Black Lagoon.
Several here on the IMDb have praised this films dialog. My guess is they are members of a secret Hippie society that have a Gestapo like fervor for anything that espouses hippie virtues. In reality, the dialog is juvenile at best. It romanticizes such lofty ideals as bean farts and the nuances of puking. The rock band Rush is referred to as a "progressive" band (in 1980? What? Perhaps in 1975 stoner circles), a small tip off as to how out of touch the script is.
A large portion of the script is dedicated to events that have nothing to do with the story. I suppose this is to help develop the characters, but shouldn't those characters first be worth developing? Come on, John, it's bad enough we have to watch the actors suck at acting, do we have to watch them suck at charades as well? What would make you think we would enjoy watching them argue about obvious political opinions, girls playing Clue, or men diving naked into a river? (note major shrinkage factor in chilly New Hampshire water) Speaking of which, what's with that strange leg tuck David Strathairn did every time he took a dive? He looked like a Don Martin cartoon from MadMagazine. That was the final straw for me. I'll bet Richard Nixon could dive better than that. Hypocrites.
