Black Phone 2 Review – Hit Horror Sequel Lumbers Toward The Freddy Krueger Franchise
Coming as the re-activated bestselling author machine was still churning out film versions, regardless of quality, The Black Phone felt like a sloppy admiration piece. Featuring a small town 70s backdrop, teenage actors, psychic kids and disturbing local antagonist, it was almost imitation and, like the very worst of King’s stories, it was also inelegantly overstuffed.
Curiously the call came from from the author's own lineage, as it was adapted from a brief tale from the author's offspring, stretched into a film that was a surprise $161m hit. It was the tale of the antagonist, a cruel slayer of children who would revel in elongating the process of killing. While assault was never mentioned, there was something unmistakably LGBTQ-suggestive about the antagonist and the period references/societal fears he was intended to symbolize, emphasized by Ethan Hawke playing him with a certain swishy, effeminate flare. But the film was too ambiguous to ever fully embrace this aspect and even without that uneasiness, it was overly complicated and overly enamored with its tiring griminess to work as only an undiscerning sleepover nightmare fuel.
The Sequel's Arrival In the Middle of Studio Struggles
The next chapter comes as former horror hit-makers the studio are in urgent requirement for success. Lately they've encountered difficulties to make any project successful, from the monster movie to The Woman in the Yard to the adventure movie to the total box office disaster of M3gan 2.0, and so significant pressure rests on whether Black Phone 2 can prove whether a compact tale can become a motion picture that can spawn a franchise. But there's a complication …
Supernatural Transformation
The original concluded with our Final Boy Finn (the performer) eliminating the villain, assisted and trained by the ghosts of those he had killed before. This has compelled writer-director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C Robert Cargill to take the series and its killer to a new place, turning a flesh and blood villain into a paranormal entity, a path that leads them via Elm Street with a capability to return into reality facilitated by dreams. But different from the striped sweater villain, the Grabber is noticeably uncreative and totally without wit. The disguise stays successfully disturbing but the film struggles to make him as frightening as he temporarily seemed in the initial film, constrained by complex and typically puzzling guidelines.
Snowy Religious Environment
The main character and his irritatingly profane sibling Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) encounter him again while snowed in at an alpine Christian camp for kids, the follow-up also referencing regarding the hockey mask killer Jason Voorhees. Gwen is guided there by a vision of her late mother and potentially their dead antagonist's original prey while the protagonist, continuing to deal with his rage and recently discovered defensive skills, is tracking to defend her. The screenplay is too ungainly in its forced establishment, awkwardly requiring to get the siblings stranded at a location that will additionally provide to backstories for both main character and enemy, filling in details we weren't particularly interested in or desire to understand. What also appears to be a more deliberate action to push the movie towards the similar religious audiences that turned the Conjuring franchise into massive hits, Derrickson adds a faith-based component, with virtue now more directly linked with the divine and paradise while villainy signifies Satan and damnation, faith the ultimate weapon against a monster like this.
Overloaded Plot
The consequence of these choices is further over-stack a franchise that was previously close to toppling over, incorporating needless complexities to what ought to be a straightforward horror movie. Frequently I discovered excessively engaged in questioning about the processes and motivations of possible and impossible events to become truly immersed. It's an undemanding role for the actor, whose face we never really see but he does have real screen magnetism that’s typically lacking in other aspects in the ensemble. The location is at times impressively atmospheric but the majority of the persistently unfrightening scenes are damaged by a rough cinematic quality to separate sleep states from consciousness, an poor directorial selection that appears overly conscious and created to imitate the frightening randomness of being in an actual nightmare.
Unconvincing Franchise Argument
At just under 2 hours, the follow-up, like M3gan 2.0 before it, is a needlessly long and highly implausible justification for the establishment of a new franchise. The next time it rings, I recommend not answering.
- Black Phone 2 debuts in Australian cinemas on October 16 and in America and Britain on October 17
