Review of P2 (2007) by Laurence C — 09 Nov 2008

There's nothing wrong with being a plotless straight-up suspenser when the cables are pulled efficiently. Who needs to deal with all the boring stuff when the main course gets your pulses pounding wildly?

Thing is, in P2, the main course IS the boring stuff. And pulses never come close to pounding wildly.

Then... what kills this film, exactly? Is it the abundance of genre clichés? Not quite. Is it the shopworn situations that end exactly like we predict? Not quite. Is it the little incoherences scattered everywhere? The uninspired visual treatment? The tomato juice that's carelessly spurting every twenty minutes to routinely jolt the audience? Nope, none of those factors truly drag P2 to its unfortunate death.

Something else does : it's the fucking mixing of two tones that are extremely hard to pull off together, those being ''DRAMATIC'' and ''FACETIOUS'', and their juxtaposition in P2 ends up close to the worst results possible. You see, poor victim Angela is who we're supposed to root for. She's the 'mouse' at the center of the game : her survival is supposedly the only interest in how things are going to turn out. And yet, we're placed in her torturer's position far too many times for it to be considered a 'tasteful' suspense story. Now if P2 was angled like an exploitation film, I suppose that might not have been a problem at all, but given the startling (I use that word loosely), realistic (I also use that word loosely) tone of the whole film, the whole experience is critically lessened from a spectator's point of view.

Are we supposed to be really anxious if Angela will escape? Or are we supposed to want to watch her suffer through grotesque situations in a very revealing dress? Don't know. Don't care. Either way, there is not nearly enough dramatic tension nor cheap shocks for the film to work on either of those modes, so you can imagine how miserable it ends up trying both. The tension deflates like a tire that is jammed with garden shears well before the halfway point.

It's not really insulting nor completely batshit crazy like Captivity, just really, really lame... and unsatisfying. Bentley is good, as always, but very miscast-- he sounds more threatening when he is not onscreen. Nichols is an able scream queen, but her character suffers from the same problem the film does : she tries to engage us seriously, but waggles her boobs around when she's not covered in slimy red.

Either way, it's not scary, and it's not really enjoyable. Simply put, the ''DRAMATIC'' and the ''FACETIOUS'' end up cockfighting instead of backing up each other.

It's a draw. And from what I know, no one likes that kind of draw in a horror film.