director
Hideo Nakata
screenwriter
Ehren Kruger
based on
characters created by
Kôji
Suzuki
Hiroshi Takahashi
producers
Laurie MacDonald
Walter F. Parkes
cinematographer
Gabriel Beristain
music
Henning Lohner
Martin Tillman
Hans Zimmer
editor
Michael N. Knue
cast
Naomi Watts (Rachel Keller)
Simon Baker (Max Rourke)
David Dorfman (Aidan Keller)
Elizabeth Perkins (Dr. Emma Temple)
Gary Cole (Martin Savide)
Sissy Spacek (Evelyn)
Kelly Stables (Evil Samara)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 111m
u.s.
release: 3/18/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other hideo
nakata films
reviewed on this website:
- ringu
see also:
- the
ring (2002)
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The Ring mythology,
at this point, is almost as dense as The Ring of the
Nibelung or that other famous work about a ring. It all started
with a novel by Kôji Suzuki, and as a reviewer on the Internet
Movie Database puts it, "There are many different films,
television series, books, comic books, etc,. based on the 'Ring
Universe,' and it's very complicated trying to sort them out."
It's just as complicated to work out the lineage of The Ring
Two. It's a sequel to the 2002 American remake
of the original 1998 Japanese Ringu,
and it follows more or less the same plot as Ringu's 1999
sequel. Furthermore, the director of Ringu and Ringu
2, Hideo Nakata, has been recruited by DreamWorks
to helm The Ring Two. Got all that?
Not that it matters much. The
appeal of The Ring to American teenagers (its biggest
audience) was its urban-legend premise -- the idea that a spooky
videotape passed from kid to kid could kill you within seven
days of watching it. In The Ring Two, the malevolent
little-girl spirit Samara returns, but this time she isn't content
to spread the word about the way her mother murdered her. No,
this time she wants a new mommy. So she settles on Rachel Keller
(Naomi Watts), who thought she'd laid Samara's soul to rest in
the first film. Rachel has moved far away from Seattle, finding
work as a copy editor at another newspaper (which affects the
plot so little that she might as well have a job at D'Angelo's).
Her son Aidan (David Dorfman, as eerily waxlike as before) starts
running a lower-than-normal temperature. Strange watery things
happen. Samara, it becomes clear, wants to inhabit Aidan's body.
If Aidan suddenly took up an
interest in the Powerpuff Girls, the movie would be a tad more
fun. As it is, Aidan has such a ghostly flat affect to begin
with that the only noticeable change is that he starts calling
Rachel "Mommy" instead of "Rachel." Aside
from a borderline ludicrous sequence in which Rachel and Aidan,
driving on a back road, are assaulted by a group of irate deer
-- a nod to the maddened horse in The Ring, I guess --
there's very little fun to go around in The Ring Two,
and scarcely any suspense or terror. The movie discards its urban-legend
frisson and becomes about the tribulations of single mothers
-- Rachel, who at one point seems ready to drown Aidan just to
force Samara out, and also a madwoman named Evelyn (Sissy Spacek
in a walk-through), who, it's revealed here, is Samara's true
birth mother and tried to drown her as a tot.
"Fear comes full circle,"
promise the ads for The Ring Two, and we could
indeed have had a cumulative horror classic if the promise were
real -- if the legacy of child-murder repeated itself, Jack Torrance-like,
in Rachel. I can envision a Ring Two in which the real
victim of possession is Rachel, who is tricked by evil Samara
into thinking her son is corrupted by the ghost, and goes insane
and actually drowns the boy -- or is caught attempting to, like
Evelyn, and gets locked away for life. That would give the movie
a point, and a horrific punch, that it doesn't have.
Instead, The Ring Two
becomes banal and literal, with Rachel getting sucked into the
videotape's reality, where she goes down that old well again
and sloshes around in that filthy water (Naomi Watts, please
fire your agent) and confronts Samara one last time. If
we're lucky. Forgive the pun, but maybe Hideo Nakata has gone
back to this well one too many times. His work here is utterly
uninspired, with no true scares to speak of except for two moments
when a victim's fear-disfigured corpse turns up (and even that
was done better in The Ring). I can't imagine anyone being
freaked out by The Ring Two the way even impressionable
teens were spooked by The Ring. And can we have
a moratorium on girl ghosts with long black hair covering their
faces? It worked fine seven years ago, but now you just wonder
why they don't trip over something.
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