The script goes big rather than home, targeting a broader spectrum of satanic over-entitled assholes, giving their ugly souls even shorter shrift than a Knives Out movie. Finally, Hollywood seems to be getting the message that what general audiences REALLY want to see is the one per cent getting the most horrific comeuppance it can sneak past the censors.
During the exposition act, the camera advances slowly along its forward axis, boldly facing down the nefarious intentions of these truly despicable villains. But once the chase is well and truly on, it’s given latitude, longitude and altitude to roam around the gardens and golf courses with the freedom of a power fantasy mostly denied to the two heroines.
Stopping not even for a cup of tea and a sit down after the unspeakable events of the first film, Samara Weaving responds to the authorities disbelieving her story with an appealing and sometimes unhinged combination of quiet sarcasm and eye-rolling acceptance.
For once, being the only survivor of a traumatic experience brings its own problems, and for once the filmmakers are willing to confront them. Weaving’s as capable of mixing together the tricky demands of horror, comedy and even drama as the returning director team known as ‘Radio Silence’ are.
A supremely nerd-friendly roster of names (including unflappable administrator Elijah Wood, resentful beneficiary Sarah Michelle Gellar and icy patriarch David Cronenberg) gallivants into the gaping maw left by the original supporting cast, pushing our buttons until we yearn to see them meet the same explosive fate.
Together they represent an absurd yet oddly believable cabal secretly controlling the entire world with a weary smugness, stopping short of the kind of easy caricature that might undermine the very real threat they pose. The more we believe in them, the more we rejoice in seeing them hoist by their own avaricious petard.
-Stew Mott-
