Ah, sequels. The refuge of mediocrity. The lazy way of producing new material. Horror is a genre especially beleaguered by sequels and remakes – occasionally decent, frequently crap.
Boy 2, alas, firmly lands in the former category. A peculiar scary movie that refuses, almost purposely, to scare. It’s slow in a way that makes its compact length of 86 minutes seem longer and bland in a way that barely resembles and no more than ghostly echoes the quite decent original Boy movie. The thing is, dolls are inherently creepy. That’s just one of those facts of life. So Boy 2 has most of its work done already the second Brahms enters the picture, but no, even that doesn’t seem to help. The doll maybe creepy but all by its demonically possessed self can’t seem to manage to elevate this snoozefest. It begins with a brutal home invasion/attack that leaves both mother and her young son traumatized. The mother begins to have nightmares, the son stops speaking. The father, guilt-ridden for not being there, takes them away to a country estate. (Presumably the dichotomy here is that dangerous things occur in cities and countryside is bucolic and safe, which might have been the case had these people took some time to research the place they chose to stay in.) Anyway, sure enough, no one does their research beforehand and so the two of them end up in a place with some dark history. And then their boy finds The Boy and…well, this is where a good movie would get interesting. Joey Potter/ former Mrs. Cruise / Katie does her best in the role of mother and her best usually involves a certain winsome charm that worked well on TV and in an occasionally in movies like the pleasantly quirky Miss Meadows and here it just doesn’t work, leaving her wide eyed and weepy and ineffectual. (Basically, really earning her Raspberry award nomination.) The father played by The Mentalist’s (and presumably other things he’s done since?) Owain Yeoman could have been anyone at all for all the non-existent heavy lifting he has to do here. Their son, though, a preternaturally pretty boy, seems to have been cast based on his uncanny likeness to Brahms doll. And I mean, uncanny. You’d think that alone would be a boundless fount of creepiness, but it’s only used to some effect. The overall production meanders sleepily sidestepping every chance to escalate things and the finished result is peculiarly tame. The movie didn’t just disappoint me, it disappointed the box office too. The director wants to make another one to round out a trilogy, but based on this, it seems that The Boy (the original) should have been left as one of those are genre standalones. The most peculiar thing is that this movie was written by the same person as the first one. Why and how remains unclear. Paycheck? Anyway, go ahead and skip this one. Don’t tarnish the memory of the far superior first movie. Don’t waste your time. Unless you can’t sleep, then by all means…
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
December 2023
Categories |