Shirley MacLaine, a canny actress of unqualified breadth of cleverness, intuitiveness and sheer heart, has said repeatedly she has no idea if a picture is going to work or not work while she's making it. Yet, certainly the script for this continuation of "Terms of Endearment" sounded an alarm, as it is incredibly dull. Writer-director Robert Harling, working from another novel by Larry McMurtry, probably bears most of the blame, but were audiences even eager to embrace a follow-up to "Terms" 13 years later? Returning to her Oscar-winning role as feisty Texan Aurora Greenway, MacLaine can't possibly be expected to have the same chemistry with a new troupe of actors as she had in the first film (we "grew up" with those characters in the course of the picture, and here everyone is dropped on us unceremoniously, with little intros of who's-who). MacLaine, playing grandmother to her deceased daughter's three now-grown children, is in full Aurora mode, but tellingly the only two sequences that work are the ones MacLaine shares with former co-star Jack Nicholson. Otherwise, it's a completely uninspired venture that leaves one cold. *1/2 from ****