Review of The Conjuring 2 (2016) by Daniel S — 14 Oct 2016

One-dimensional stock characters and all the inevitable "ghost hunt" story tropes, hitting just about every possible scriptwriting cliche this type of movie could cram in. A few mildly spooky moments, so it's not entirely worthless, but they're almost invariably undermined by something risible. The film also makes the rather bizarre assumption that "someone's cranky grandpa" is a sufficiently scary template for a ghost. The addition of soaking-wet bucketloads of unambiguous and single-minded religious preaching is something you can decide for yourself as a good or bad thing. The imperiled family is mostly enjoyable from an acting perspective, but the square-jawed, squeaky-clean lead actors are so faultlessly perfect and sterile as to be almost infuriating.

It perhaps also bears notice that, while the previous film in this series was content to make utterly faultless martyrs out of its actual-proven-real-life-fraud protagonists, that was the worst of it. Apparently the scriptwriters were aware some people were averse to that, because this movie addresses it, by... briefly dragging in a straw-man skeptic to point out the Warrens' ghost-hunts have been demonstrable lies, only to be told "Nuh-uh" and drop his entire argument instantly. (This is almost literally how it plays out. The exchange is a total of two lines.) Then it just doubles down on the "petting the dog" scriptwriting recipes for manipulating audiences into accepting characters as Nice People(TM) short of actually having them hold cute animals. It's like a movie about the clowning career of John Wayne Gacy, in which one character briefly mentions "some people" say he murdered people, and another says "No he didn't" and the film carries on.