The Return of Tommy Tricker

The Return Of Tommy Tricker is a sequel film to another children's fantasy with the same character title. The thought behind both these films is to interest Canadian kids in the wonderful world of stamp collecting. With such things as video games and the internet I wonder if stamp collecting holds the same fascination as it did for children years ago.

If you saw the first film you learned that there are certain postal stamps that if you possess them and know the magic words, you can have your self mailed anywhere in the world. Beats the airlines any day what with their prices now.

Anyway Tommy and his friends find one of those stamps on an undelivered letter with a young kid on it. In a collection that is now over half a century old, the kid is still young on the stamp. What will happen if the letter is ever delivered who knows.

The kids would like to rescue their peer on the postage stamp, but Tommy has plans to make money out of it. The authors of both films saw Tommy as a combination of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the modern day.

For myself I found it almost ghoulish Tommy's self absorption in seeking to profit from a kid's misery. The kid on the stamp reminded me of that classic Star Trek TNG episode where the current Enterprise crew finds Scotty trapped in an abandoned ship's transport. Imagine where poor James Doohan would be if Jean-Luc Picard or any of his crew behaved in a similar fashion.

This one like its predecessor is strictly for kids.

This movie has major loop holes and a really stupid plot. It picks up where the first movie left off. Only they made this about 5 years later. None of the characters look remotely the same! Also major changes make this movie have poor continuity from the first.

In the first, Tommy's dad left him and his family a while back. Everyone assumes he is a bum, but nobody know where he is. In the sequel he know his dad, a bum, and talks with him. He HATED his father in the first one, yet here he liked the guy and missed him.

Tommy lived with his single mom and several siblings in a tiny rundown apartment complex. In the sequel he lives with his mom and step dad in a normal house. Now I doubt all this happened in the few days he was gone...

As I said the plot is incredibly bad. Tommy plans to release Charles, from the stamp in the first movie, and buy and island where kids can be and stamp collectors can see the famous kid in the stamp. Gee. That is now tops on my vacation spots I tell you. Who is he kidding? Like anyone would pay to go there.

The acting is bad all around and is worse than the first one. I suggest you avoid this one. Only mildly recommended for kids under 9-10 if their is nothing better they want to see.

This film is a sequel to "Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller" (1988). The original film was fresh, had many interesting exotic locations, and the relationships between the actors were believable. It was fun and interesting. The plot was for children but it was fun enough to keep adults interested too.

Sadly, the sequel "The Return" fails. And it fails miserably. The plot makes no sense, the characters are not believable, and there is an undercurrent of hostility throughout the film. An example of this is in the beginning of the film when Tommy steals a stamp and runs away to a hidden clubhouse (basically a hole in the ground with a sheet metal top) with a friend.

Another boy follows them, hears them plotting through a pipe (which is used like a periscope sticking out of the ground). The boy then urinates into the pipe and into the face of Tommy's friend. He is then tricked into the hole and is trapped by Tommy putting rocks on the covering of the clubhouse. Tommy and friend then abandon him there.

Tommy's friend sneaks back later when Tommy doesn't know and lets the other boy out. But the implication here is that had the other boy not come back Tommy wouldn't have either.

This is not a good movie. What should have been a merry adventure for all turned out to be a slow paced, nonsensical trip to nowhere. Wasted locations, wasted cultures, and wasted actors. I recommend that if you must see this film see it before you see "Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller" so you won't be too unhappy with it. But see the first film, definitely.

Not a particularly imaginative sequel, but perhaps lightning could never strike twice. It was nice to hear the same musical cues. Tommy Tricker isn't as engaging as portrayed in the first film. Polly Mereweather's vocals sound manifestly dubbed, and her Kiwi(?) accent doesn't jell right with her Australian(?) accented brother. Nit picking of course - but the acting is quite wooden. Where's the charm of the original? I suppose the real purpose of this film was to update the original for a new generation of kids rather than a sequel per se, but perhaps six isn't a significant gap (most prescient now in the IT age - Typical Kid: "Stamps?"). At a shorter running time than TOMMY TRICKER, they should perhaps have created a few more sub-plots and some real presence of tension/or race against the clock scenario.

I acted in this movie as Charles Merriweather. I recommend this movie for children. I am now 15 years old, and i understand that kids my age will find this a waste of time. When acting in this movie it gave me the chance to be myself as a kid and now i look back on this movie with great memories and would love the opportunity to act again in a great movie such as this.

Oliver Morgan- Varlow