Reviewed by Michael Edwards
Stars Rachel Nichols, Wes Bentley, Philip Atkin, Stephanie Moore, Miranda Edwards, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Bathsheba Garnett,
Philip Williams, Arnold Pinnock, Franck Khalfoun
Written by Franck Khalfoun, Alexandre Aja & Gregory Levasseur
Certification UK 18 | US R
Runtime 98 minutes
Directed by Franck Khalfoun
After working late, Angela — a beautiful, high-flying businesswoman of some sort — sets off to go home. She reaches her car on the second level of the car park under her swanky office building and realises it won't start. She calls a cab but can't get out to it — she has been mysteriously locked in. Suddenly we jump cut to her being wrestled to the ground, her mouth covered in a chloroform-soaked cloth. The next thing we know she is being held prisoner by a lonely and mildly psychotic security guard. From here the tale becomes one of the captive trying to flee the captor.
A template horror of the most irksome sort, P2 has more flaws on more levels than a hastily excavated conflict diamond. Firstly, the story takes place at Christmas but the film is being released in May. Why? Secondly, psychotic security guard Thomas is meant to be scary because he is just an ordinary guy. Thus Wes Bentley was cast. But he ends up pulling off neither of the prerequisities of the character, too good-looking to be convincingly ordinary and lonely and too bad an actor to pull of an scenes of insanity without the audience bursting out into spontaneous laughter. Thirdly, the film is riddled with cliches and tired horror techniques. There is nothing I hate more than a bandly set up scare moment — you know the kind I mean, we have a lot of ambient noise or some monotonous ambient sound which suddenly dies down for a moment before BANG! A dog barks, or someone walks round a corner from the dark. These were the only bits of the film that made me jump, and that was the closest I got to being scared. The only intended psychopathic moment which attempted to turn Thomas into a manic killer was a crazy act of revenge that had been set up so early that it was as predictable as it was unconvincingly performed.
To make matters worse, the film made me uncomfortable for more subtle reasons. I sat for about 30 minutes or so trying to work out what it was that made me feel a little weird (I was certain it wasn't any of the pitiful attempts at creating a creepy atmosphere). It all became clear in the scene where Angela (Nichols) is trapped in a lift and instead of coming to get her Thomas floods the lift with water — thus soaking Nichols' dress for the duration of the movie: this film is just a male control fantasy, with only the predictable ending standing as a testament to the contrary. The fact that Thomas doesn't come across as that crazy, and that we so frequently see Angela being watched by him, is that P2 is at once trying to tap into the psychotic killer theme and appeal to the desire of certain male cinema-goers to have their deep-seated fantasies pandered to. It's an awkward marriage and doesn't work well at all.
However, a rottweiler does get its head bashed in with a tyre iron, and many more ridiculous chase and fight scenes which will make you laugh more than the latest Judd Apatow smash hit. As a horror film P2 sucks, pure and simple, as light entertainment you could do far worse. If you enjoy inadvertent pastiche to the back-to-basics B-movie horrors that offer little more than loud noises and ridiculous acts of violence perpetrated by caricatures then P2 is an hour and a half well spent.