Overall Rating
  Awesome: 4.21%
Worth A Look: 8.42%
Average: 21.05%
Pretty Bad: 41.05%
Total Crap: 25.26%
7 reviews, 53 user ratings
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| Ring 2, The |
by Scott Weinberg
"THIS is the thanks we get for making Part 1 such a hit? Thanks for nothin'!"
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This no-brain, assembly-line sequel is so predictably beholden to its predecessor that you can practically smell the reek of formula cooling on its hide. It's not scary, it's not fun or exciting or even remotely creepy; "The Ring 2" doesn't even bother to include what made the first chapter so surprisingly entertaining. As a matter of fact, it practically expectorates upon what the fans were hoping for.One of the most challenging and intriguing things about Ringu and its American counterpart, The Ring, was its rules. There was a strict, firm, and unbreakable set of guidelines laid down in these movies, rules so stringent and concise that they connected seamlessly with the creepiness of the plot. There was a videotape, a deadline, and a creepy ghost who owned your soul if you strayed from the rules one measly iota. This was the backbone of both Ring movies, and it was a clever enough gimmick to yield several sequels on both sides of the Pacific.
Needless to say, we Americans have the market cornered on sloppy seconds, and this shamelessly inept sequel is only the most recent example. Returning from the original are screenwriter Ehren Kruger (working entirely on auto-pilot), leading lady Naomi Watts (with her performance set firmly on sleepwalk mode), and the world's most annoying child actor. (David Dorfman, looking like the lost Culkin kid and behaving like a miniature comatose Bill Pullman.)
Remember all that deliciously nasty stuff about demonic video cassettes and unimpeachable deadlines of death? Yeah, all that stuff is gone here. The videotape conceit is given casual lip service in the first act of this sequel, and (for some moronic reason) never referred to again. It would be like making a sequel to Back to the Future and not using the damn Delorean. Deadlines? Nope. Watts is content to wander around aimlessly, periodically stopping in to see a freaky old woman in one scene (Sissy Spacek really does deserve better than this) and avoiding a herd of vicious reindeer (!) the next. Don't forget one golden rule of sequel-making: if you have a homicidal horse in Part 1, you absolutely must have homicidal reindeer in Part 2 ... even if the freaky elks have literally no bearing on the rest of the brain-damaged plot.
Without the employment of the previously mentioned videocassette from Hell, the movie just mopes around with no urgency and very little excitement. How the ethereal Samara manages to terrorize her prey makes no sense at all. Sure, the VHS tape is not much more than a thinly veiled McGuffin, but it indicates that there are at least some rules in play. The first flick was smart enough to stay within the parameters of its own created world ... and it followed the rules. The Ring 2 cannot be bothered with such narrative bullshit; it's just a nonsensical collection of annoying jump-scares and meandering plot holes. Oh, and it's all capped off with one insipid F-bomb catch phrase, as if to underline the fact that acquiring that PG-13 rating is infinitely more important than, y'know, making a half-decent horror flick.I can't really say what sort of quality I was expecting from a sequel to a remake, but I sure expected something a lot more intriguing than this boring and inert mass. Perhaps it's that director Hideo Nakata was just hired as a studio puppet -- or perhaps the director of Part 1 (Gore Verbinski) is a much better filmmaker than he gets credit for. Frankly, I chalk the whole sorry affair up to brainless Hollywood sequel-making in general; when you have a follow-up that's a guaranteed smash hit no matter what, I suppose it's easy to intentionally gloss over things like narrative structure, plot cohesion, character development, and plain old common sense. In lieu of all that stuff ... we get killer reindeer. Let me know when the next Ring shows up so I can let my voice-mail answer.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11679&reviewer=128
originally posted: 03/20/05 10:50:42
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2005 SXSW Film Festival. For more in the 2005 South By Southwest Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
18-Mar-2005 (R)
DVD: 23-Aug-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
24-Mar-2005
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