Anticipation.
A good reason to return to the cinemas for some brash blockbuster hokum.
Enjoyment.
Some nice shocks in the mix, but too much of a stale retread of the first film.
In Retrospect.
Let down by some laughably contrived screenwriting.
The sleeper hit about a world in which hard-soled shoes are a major health risk returns for this sequel, which was postponed by over a year due to the pandemic shutdown.
We join the Abbott clan on day one of an intergalactic alien invasion in a shimmering burg of homespun Americana that would make Norman Rockwell gag on his postum. The local little league game is rudely interrupted by marauding, long-limbed creatures who are highly sensitive to sound and whose only purpose in life is to violently swipe humans off their feet.
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The first film, from 2018, saw Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and mountain man hubby Lee (John Krasinski, who directed the original and this new one) having to embrace the silent life while maintaining a domestic utopia in an idyllic Appalachian backwood.
It all eventually goes south, yet the film worked due to a couple of cannily mounted set pieces and a simple conceptual underpinning that didn’t push too hard for wider metaphorical relevance. That is to say, you could take its themes of enforced solitude and thinking hard before speaking and apply your own meaning.
This second swing of the bat is mostly effective popcorn fare, but where the first episode turned its limitations into advantages, this one comes across like a quick strike while the iron is hot, with ramped up action and fewer if any openings for interpretation.
The monsters themselves are this time omnipresent, and there’s little sense of encroaching terror, or fear generated through the possibility of danger rather than its inevitability. It’s almost as if these ghouls are waiting just outside of shot for a pin to drop so they can mount their attack, and the mechanics this time seem to entirely dismiss the key to the first film’s success: that it was the absence that made it scary.
Cillian Murphy is subbed in as the male lead, keeping time as the brooding Emmett with baseball cap peaked over sullen eyes, and whose own dire saga appears to have played out at the same time as the Abbotts’. Daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) is keen to take over the role of patriarch and lead the family to safety, and the film teases this intriguing notion a few times, only to have Emmett step in and save the day and her return to the role of youthful damsel.
It’s a shame, as Simmonds is the ace that is kept up the film’s sleeve, her expressiveness and charisma nudged to the film’s fringes, particularly in its disappointing second half.
Behind the camera, Krasinski delivers some robust work, particularly the pin-balling prologue in which the family make their first encounter with the beast. We get a short form, end-to-end disaster movie in the first five minutes, and it’s an early highlight the film never manages to replicate.
Elsewhere, there’s much rehashing of classic action blockbuster motifs, such as Terminator 2’s car chase in which the T‑1000 is hooked to the back of a car, and pretty much everything involving raptors in Jurassic Park. It’s all fine and dandy, but it’s never great to be cudgelled by influences and left feeling nostalgic for other movies.
At one point, the camera tracks low across an abandoned train station platform, and we see shoes and briefcases piled on the floor. In the context of rail travel, it’s all a little near-the-knuckle, and this half-cocked allusion to Holocaust imagery doesn’t play any further part in a story which is focused instead on action, action, action. It translates as a desperate swipe for gravitas, and is only really permissible because the film dispenses entirely with humour.
Where things largely falter is in Krasinski’s writing, which feels like he had some major assists from the Screenplay-O-Matic 5000. There is so much blatant foreshadowing in this movie that there’s barely any sunlight. And the parallel story structure the film adopts goes to occasionally embarrassing lengths to create synchronicity between its duelling timelines. Say what you will about Christopher Nolan, but he’s much better at pulling off these wild structural pirouettes than Krasinski is here.
We won’t say how it ends as the spoiler police will have us whacked, but the sudden arrival of the credits provoked a roll of the eyes rather than a flutter of the heart.
