Well, this is a hot mess.
After making the main plot of Night Watch about the coming of the Great Other, and their choice between Light and Dark, the second movie blithely kicks off by announcing that not only are there actually two Great Others, but that there's also something called the 'Chalk of Fate', which allows you to undo the mistakes of your past.
If that Chalk sounds like a big red reset button, well, that's because a big red reset button is exactly what it is. Now having a film that's all about hitting reset can work. I mean, I watched X-Men: Days of Future Past recently. It had exactly that premise, and it worked fine.
This is not one of those movies.
For one thing, we're again treated to some incredibly convoluted plan from the bad guy, but this time the plan kinda makes no sense since, you know, he won last time and just has to wait for the final victory. Or, if that wasn't true, then it makes the first movie make no sense since everyone acted like it was a do or die moment. When it apparently wasn't.
The film also managed to get me off side early on when it had a female character go all trembly lipped after her male superior scolded her. In my younger days I would have been irritated at the character for that. Now I get irritated at the writers.
Anyway, this film has lots and lots of running around, and a body-swap sequence that is actually reasonably good fun, even if the point of the body swap - tricking the bad guys - is immediately shown to have not worked. That's symptomatic of the film, actually. There is lots and lots of activity, but it all seems to be largely pointless. Either it doesn't work, or it was never meant to work, or ... frankly it becomes hard to care about what's happening on screen when none of it seems to matter, you know?
The body swap antics, some cool action scenes, and even a creepy spider-doll aren't enough to save this film from being an incoherent and frankly rather boring viewing experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment