2009 (Spain)
Contains spoilers.
Now I'm going to be
a Debbie downer from the off. I enjoyed the first film, it wasn't perfect but
it provided enough jumps and thrills to earn a solid 7/10 from me and left me
eagerly anticipating this second outing. We'd been left with many unanswered questions
and after a good debut thrill ride a sequel could only be better. So did
it satiate my anticipation? In brief, no, not really. I kind of feel it was a hastily put together cash in with a hodgepodge plot thrown together at the last
minute and an over-reliance on what it thought were the first film's key
strengths. Ok, it's not all bad and directors and writers Jaume Balagueró and
Paco Plaza obviously had a clear idea of where they wanted to take the
franchise. The core narrative and direction is fine, it just could have
benefited from more time and thought.
Following on
immediately from [REC], [REC]² follows a small team of four special operations
military types and Dr Owen (Jonathan Mellor), an official from the Ministry of
Health as they enter the quarantined building to establish what the heck's been
going on and gain control of the situation. Immediately being presented with lots of
blood and the obvious signs that serious bad shit had gone down, the
specialised and experienced unit ignore all their training and rather than
establish control and work room to room they, under the instruction of Dr.
Owen, make a bee line straight to the penthouse where he argues the source of
the outbreak is.
With the roaming
rabid zombies all taking a convenient five minute nap the team make it the top
without incident where Dr Owen reveals his true identity, that of a Vatican
priest and frontline religious problem solver sent to get a sample of blood
from the Medeiros girl, help the old priest and save the world. Conveniently
(I'll be using that word a lot) informing the team that they'll be isolated
with no backup or external communication for the duration of their stay and
that only he has the password to let them out, the rest of the film follows the
priest and team stumble from one tense frenzied zombie encounter to another in
an increasingly absurd, far fetched and implausible story.
A hallmark of [REC] was the shaky-cam-first-person perspective and Rec² is no different.
Conveniently all the team are equipped with helmet-mounted video cameras but
where-as for the most part Rec achieved a level of believability to why the
camera was there and wasn't being turned off while all hell broke lose, in Rec²
it felt a tad more forced, not necessarily from them having cameras turned on,
but rather why their feeds weren't being transmitted to a control unit outside,
and there was absolutely no back-up or central command.
Blood found, priest
found, a world minutes away from salvation, and only thirty minutes in, a
convenient complete you-can-see-this-coming-a-mile-away-so-why can't-they
bungle sees our team and film back square one. The directors now obviously
desperate for additional content throw some new victims, I mean characters, into the mix. A group of three teenagers, conveniently near by and conveniently
curious, team up with the father of
little girl from the first film, conveniently convince a fire fighter to break the
quarantine and let them in through a conveniently unguarded second entrance
that's then conveniently welded up leaving them stranded with the rest.
And this is the crux
of all my issues with the film; it's choc-stuffed with daft decisions obviously
made to heighten tension and engineer horror scenes with high-impact and shock
value, but it's all at the expense of retaining coherent narrative and maintaining
authentic character behaviour. At some point someone forgot that the scares,
the gore and the suspense were the tools that drove the story and characters of
the first and not vice-versa. In [REC]² it's all turned around as they try
and force the narrative to drive the shocks and scares. It doesn't work and
feels mocked up throughout.
It's not all bad
though. The zombie scenes are some of the most frantic and heart pumping I can
remember. These are not slow rambling Romero zombies but savage, powerful and
terrifying. The top tier special effects and closeness awarded from the first
person perspective leads to genuine feeling of terror. [REC] worked in part
because it was a character driven narrative and it's not surprising to see the [REC]² skimp in this area as well. You maybe didn't particularly like reporter Ángela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) in [REC] but
you became invested in her character and as you followed her decent into fear
the shocks and scares took on more substance. The soldiers and later teenagers
of [REC]² are whilst well acted, unmemorable, one-sided and bland and any impact
felt from their scares and inevitable mauling is reduced, as you realise you
weren't invested in their characters from the start.
[REC]² is suspenseful,
genuinely shocking, well filmed, solidly acted and has a good play with some
interesting ideas, but it also suffers from unmemorable characters, an
incoherent rambling unauthentic narrative full of cliché and more plot holes
than a colander. It's not a bad film per se
and if you like shocks at the expense of story it might work for you but as it
is, and especially when put up against the original, a complete let down 4/10.
Steven@WTD.
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