Review: A Quiet Place Part II

After the events of the first film, the Abbott family (Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmons, Noah Jupe) must search for a new place to live and avoid the creatures. Cillian Murphy plays a troubled family friend who reluctantly offers them refuge.


I called the first “A Quiet Place” something to the effect of “Jump Scare: The Movie”, a film that featured an interesting and likeable family of characters and put them in a too-familiar situation and relied far too much on cheap ‘jump scare’ tactics. I find ‘jump scares’ annoying and startling, not scary and frankly they are among the laziest of all horror scare-making tropes, so I was never going to have a great time there. Well, with a healthy box-office return and a 90%+ Rotten Tomatoes rating a lot of you likely disagree with me. So now here’s the 2020 follow-up from producer-writer-director John Krasinski and it’s just flat-out useless. Your mileage may differ, but I suspect not greatly much this time. The characters are still likeable (aside from perhaps Murphy’s mumbly, embittered family friend), all of the actors sell fear believably, without question. However, it’s more of the same and half as effective. It truly is the same thing all over again: Silence…silence…BOOM! Rinse and repeat for 90 minutes. That’s not a movie, that’s a bloody ghost train at an amusement park. I love movies, not amusement park rides I’m afraid. After a fairly effective, if narratively unnecessary prologue, the film just lost me completely. Emily Blunt is terrific, I didn’t care.

 

The first film wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t terribly appealing to me. This follow-up is more of the same but about 10% as effective and not appealing to me at all, in spite of some solid performances. It’s a gimmick, not a film. Well-shot, well-acted, and it did nothing for me.

 

Rating: D

 

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