TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Ring Two'


From today's Oregonian:




The first "The Ring" didn't make a lot of sense. That just made it scarier.

A vengeful, decades-dead little girl puts a seven-day curse on people? Fine. How, exactly, that relates to videotapes and horses throwing themselves off ferries? Well, that's a stickier wicket.

It didn't matter. As with many of the new-wave Japanese horror films (including "Ringu" and "Ju-On: The Grudge"), the first "Ring" was about putting nonsense in the service of terror. Director Gore Verbinski very carefully used his camera, actors and soundtrack to create a feeling of dread; as a result, when things didn't make a lick of sense, you felt helpless rather than insulted -- as if you were at the mercy of forces you couldn't understand. And when Rachel (Naomi Watts) copied that cursed videotape and sent it out into the world, she and her son Aidan (David Dorfman) may have cheated death, but they were also damning the planet. It was a merciless ending to one of the better horror films in recent years.

But using dread to paper over nonsense is a delicate business. Which brings us to today's bit of bad news: "The Ring Two" is a mild disaster.

Verbinski has moved on to greener directorial pastures, leaving the sequel in the hands of Hideo Nakata -- the Japanese director of "Ringu," which the original "Ring" remade. This would seem like a canny move. It's not. Nakata's direction is straightforward enough, and Astoria (where the film is set) hasn't looked this good since "The Goonies." But he fails at creating that crucial relentlessness that made the first film such a chiller.

The script (by "Ring" scribe Ehren Kruger, who's a perfectly decent interview) is, well, it’s terrible. Apparently under the impression that the best way to flee a watery ghost is to get even closer to the ocean, Rachel and Aidan have fled Seattle for the Oregon coast, where Rachel's taken a job at The Daily Astorian. (I myself will be applying for a job there tomorrow, as the movie reveals that reporters at the Daily make enough money to own gorgeous multi-story Craftsman-era homes.)

Sure enough, they're followed by that pesky cursed videotape, which kids have been passing on to each other as a sort of extreme scare-sport. At which point the film just decides to undo everything that made the first "Ring" compelling or scary.

The tape is actually written out of the film fairly quickly: Rachel steals it and sets it on fire, and it makes this hilarious little screeching noise as it melts in a trash barrel. But the ghost-girl Samara, who apparently never needed a videotape to begin with (perhaps she's upgraded to TiVo?) sticks around -- having decided that she's going to possess Aidan's body at any cost.

What follows is a series of "eerie" set pieces that, robbed of any overwhelming sense of curse-dread, just seem vaguely silly and maybe even insulting. For no particular reason, Rachel and Aidan are menaced by a herd of CGI deer. Pictures of trees get burned into walls. Water hovers. Sissy Spacek gnaws on the set for about five minutes as a crazy mother in a fright wig. We take a trip to Scary TV Land. And poor Watts (who said she was too busy filming "King Kong" to do much promotion for "The Ring Two") has a scene where she tells her sleeping son something along the lines of, "You told me Samara couldn't get us when we're asleep. You're asleep. Tell me how to stop her!"

Uh, Rachel? He's asleep. So, apparently, are the filmmakers pulling your strings.

A hollow "Ring Two" (The Oregonian, March 18, 2005)


Posted: Fri - March 18, 2005 at 12:00 AM        

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