Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Rodo Sayagues
Starring: Stephen Lang, Madelyn Grace, Brendan Sexton III,
Stephanie Arcila, Bobby Schofield
One of the many ridiculous aspects of the
Fast & Furious franchise is how the villain of one
instalment can become the hero of the next, accepted by the protagonists
regardless of what sins they might have committed. This led to the online
'Justice for Han' campaign, in which fans tried to remind the
screenwriters that Jason Statham's Deckard Shaw brutally murdered Sung
Kang's Han Lue and they struggled to buy him becoming a wisecracking buddy
of Han's surviving friends.
A swift transition from goody to baddy is possible. Just look at
Terminator 2. But that's a unique scenario. Arnie's T-800 isn't a human, it's a
machine programmed to serve its master, and so isn't subject to any moral
judgement.
If the villain of your movie is guilty of crimes including murder, rape
and kidnapping, is it possible to flip them into hero mode for an
immediate sequel? On the evidence of Don't Breathe 2, no, it's not.
Fede Alvarez's surprise hit
Don't Breathe
saw a gang of young hoodlums break into the home of a blind military vet
with the intention of stealing his life savings. Turned out the blind man
in question, Norman Nordstrom (Stephen Lang, completing his
transition from schlubby character actor to jacked up man mountain), had
some dark secrets of his own which he was willing to kill to protect. How
do you get the audience to root for home invaders over a blind man? Well,
you reveal that the blind man has an abducted woman imprisoned in his
basement, and he's impregnated her with his own seed and the use of a
turkey baster.
Having survived the first movie, Nordstrom returns for the sequel (the
first film's anti-heroine, played by Jane Levy, is sorely missed here).
He's up to his abduction antics once again as a prologue shows how he
swiped a three-year-old after she escaped from her parents' burning home.
Eight years later and the girl, whom he's named Phoenix (Madelyn Grace), has been well and truly gaslit into believing that she's Nordstrom's
daughter. He doesn't keep her in his basement at least, but he keeps her
on a shorter leash than his pet Rottweiler. Nordstrom seems to have a
genuine affection for Phoenix, which seems to be mutual, and there's no
suggestion that any abuse has gone down in their relationship. Determined
to keep Phoenix safe, Nordstrom puts her through rigorous survival
training on a daily basis. This might seem like extreme helicopter
parenting, but they do live in Detroit after all.
No amount of Nordstrom's doting father routine can erase our memory of
what we learned about him in the first movie, so it's impossible to root
for him, even if the antagonists are a right bunch of scuzzballs. This
time, Nordstrom's home gets invaded by a bunch of hoods who aren't after
money, but Phoenix. They're an instantly dislikable lot, all bad peroxide
jobs who insist on calling each other "bro" despite being white. But
Nordstrom has kidnapped a woman, raped her and eventually murdered her,
along with kidnapping a child and gaslighting her for eight years!
Early on it seems that the film might centre Phoenix, who comes off
initially as a bit of a badass. But any prospects of her being a
pint-sized Sarah Connor are soon dispelled as she's abducted and it's left
up to Nordstrom to deploy his unique set of skills to win her back. We've
recently seen two movies from co-directors
David Charbonier and Justin Powell
–
The Djinn
and
The Boy Behind the Door
– that ably demonstrate how you can have a child as the hero of your
horror movie. Watching Nordstrom butcher the baddies isn't half as
interesting as a scenario in which Phoenix offs her abductors using the
skills he taught her might have been. What's the point in establishing
that Nordstrom has taught Phoenix all these survival skills if she never
gets to deploy them?
The first movie may have had its share of silliness (why would a blind man
keep newspaper clippings?), but Don't Breathe 2 reaches new
levels of idiocy. The dialogue plays like it was created by a computer
programme that was fed the scripts of a dozen '80s action movies. At one
point, I shit you not, one of the baddies realises what they're up against
and utters the line "The guy's a Navy SEAL!" Perhaps the dumbest aspect of
Don't Breathe 2 is how it's revealed that its premise hangs
on the idea that a gang of drug dealers need to keep a woman alive because
she's their meth cook. Look, no offence to the good people of Motown, but
I'm pretty sure they could find someone in Detroit who knows how to cook
meth. They're able to run across a bloke who knows how to perform a heart
transplant, for fuck's sake!
If Fede Alvarez's Don't Breathe felt like it was made by
someone who grew up watching the classic grindhouse movies of the '70s,
Rodo Sayagues' Don't Breathe 2 feels like it was made
by someone who grew up watching the films of filmmakers who grew up
watching the classic grindhouse movies of the '70s. It's the sort of movie
Eli Roth might have made in 2005 if he was obsessed with French rather
than Italian genre cinema (more than a few moments from Luc Besson's
Nikita and
Leon
are cribbed from here, including a particularly cringey take on Gary
Oldman's "Bring me everyone!!!" howl, while the pastel colour scheme
recalls France's cinema du look school). There's a heavy whiff of Rob
Zombie off its white trash aesthetics and edgelord provocations.
Alvarez's film was a tight, confined thriller that made great use of its
single location and cleverly reversed the setup of
Wait Until Dark. Sayagues' sequel is an unfocussed mess that suffers from an anti-hero
we just can't sympathise with, confusing direction, laughable dialogue and
a scuzzy worldview that prevents us from even enjoying its flaws on an
ironic level.
Don't Breathe 2 is on Netflix
UK/ROI now.