In short: Vabank II, czyli riposta (1985)

aka Point of No Return

Warsaw, 1936. After two years of jail time, ex-bank owner and still scumbag Kramer (Leonard Pietraszak) escapes with the help of former prison mate Edek Sztyc (Bronislaw Wroclawski) and his associates. He still has a nice Swiss bank account to pay for this sort of thing, it turns out. While Sztyc would really rather make his way to Switzerland with Kramer as quickly as possible, his new employer won’t leave Poland until he has taken his revenge on safe cracker and criminal mastermind Henryk Kwinto (Jan Machulski), who tricked him into prison in the first movie.

Kwinto has actually retired now and moved to the country with Marta (Ewa Szykulska) and her little daughter, but when Kramer and his associates begin trying to kill him and his old associates – who have now gone into the movie business – something has to be done. That this something will eventually turn into a rather complicated yet fun plot to thwart Kramer shouldn’t surprise anyone.

I don’t love the second Vabank movie – again directed by Juliusz Machulski and bringing back the complete main cast of the first film - quite as much as the first one. That’s mostly a question of pacing here: despite actually being ten minutes or so shorter Vabank II feels quite a bit slower and includes, mostly in its first half, a couple scenes that simply slow things down too much for my taste. Particularly the black face (yeah, I don’t know either) musical number with the title song performed by Jacek Chmielnik seems to be completely useless to the film and could be excised for pace as well as good taste, but generally, the film does simply take a bit too long to get going.

However, once it does, Vabank II does come into its own rather well. This is not one of those sequels that simply try to copy the first movie but really stands in dialogue with it, mirroring and commenting on the first film but going its own way when it wants and needs to. The cast is still very fun to watch, and Kwinto’s eventual plot is still constructed with wit and a light hand, with funny and clever little ideas coming up with nice regularity. The only people who die here are still professional killers, everyone else gets their comeuppance in other, perfectly appropriate ways, and things wrap up with a grin by middle-aged men who aren’t arseholes. The film even takes care to give its characters an actual happy end, which isn’t that easy in a movie set in Poland this close to the Nazi invasion, but which I appreciated quite a bit.