Oh, how the jokes just practically write themselves -- a movie so horrifying, so horrible, that watching it
kills you! "Haha, just like this movie! Haha!"
The Ring Two isn't that bad -- but I'm almost certain (meaning I very much hope) you won't see another film this year with a script this brazenly illogical, this stupefyingly nonsensical, this maddeningly incoherent.
That script comes to you from Ehren Kruger, the talentless scribe who forced
Reindeer Games on us. Of course, he also wrote
The Ring, and it's worth pointing out that everything good about that film was present in the original Japanese film, and everything bad (medical equipment in strange places, horses going crazy on ferries) came from Kruger's adaptation. Illogic, preposterousness, total incoherence -- these are the trademarks of Kruger's work, and all are on display here in large quantities.
Previously on
The Ring, Rachel (Naomi Watts) and her son, Aidan (David Dorfman), did battle with the ghost of Samara, who was drowned in a well by her stepmother. Samara's spirit infected a videotape: watch the tape and you get a phone call from an ominous voice saying, "Seven days..."; seven days later, Samara crawls out of the television and kills you. Sure, that doesn't really make a lot of sense, and leaves a number of plot holes wide open (what happens if you don't answer the phone when she calls? what if you stay away from the TV?), but
The Ring (in both the Japanese and American versions) coasted along with good performances and impressive visuals.
Now, an undetermined time later, another copy of the tape has surfaced and is once again tormenting high schoolers...and by coincidence (or is it?), it happens to be in the small Washington town Rachel and Aidan have fled to from Seattle. Somehow, though, these kids know how to break the curse: make a copy of the evil tape and show it to someone else. But one kid screws up, and he winds up dead and deformed ("plague-style," as my friends have dubbed it), drowned in his living room. Rachel finds out, naturally, and is horrified: how could there be another tape? "We only made one copy," she whispers to herself. Where did this new tape come from?
That's a damn good question, but you won't find an answer in this movie. How did these new victims know that making a copy frees you from the curse? Another good question, and another one the script isn't interested in. (My guess: they all saw
The Ring.) In fact, the whole videotape concept is abandoned twenty minutes into the movie, as Samara decides she doesn't need it anymore -- I suppose all those people she killed before gave her enough experience points to advance to the next level, because now she's got a bunch of new powers.
She starts terrorizing Rachel and Aidan, though it isn't clear how she found them to begin with. We get more insane animal attacks (this time it's a fleet of rampaging deer instead of a horse), we get mysterious bruises, we get creepy images on the TV. Not only does none of it cohere to the predecessor, none of it gels together with itself -- the narrative practically starts over every twenty minutes, with the plot jerking suddenly in a completely new direction and forgetting everything that came before it. And in between, director Hideo Nakata (director of
Ringu and
Ringu 2) gives us endless scenes of creepy imagery in which absolutely nothing happens.
Case in point: the aforementioned deer attack. It comes out of nowhere -- Aidan exchanges a funny look with a deer, and two scenes later, there are fifty of them banging holes in Rachel's car. Aidan knows it's coming before it happens; just before the first strike, he whispers, "Don't stop." The deer force her to...they break the windows...and then they stop. They look at Rachel. She looks at them. She drives away. They watch her go. And it's never mentioned again. No explanation, no nothing. (Oh, Nakata's camera, late in the film, lingers on a big pile of antlers in the house where Samara grew up -- if that explains anything, it's clearly over my head.)
Samara tries, over and over again, to kill Aidan and Rachel...which doesn't make any sense, considering why she's after them in the first place. (I won't say why, even though it's in the trailer; suffice to say, it's really, really stupid.) In the meantime, both Rachel and Aidan slither like Solid Snake through places they shouldn't be able to sneak through -- police stations, coroner's vans, homicide crime scenes, hospitals, other people's homes, entire towns. Bit characters show up to provide a nuisance during these scenes, then vanish abruptly into thin air, because if they hung around the scene wouldn't work.
Forty-five minutes in, I realized that I had absolutely no idea what was going on; thirty minutes later, I stopped caring. And once the climax kicked into high gear, I literally gave up trying and just looked at the pretty pictures. It isn't scary, it isn't disturbing, and it's barely even unintentionally funny -- it's just boring.
Can there be a
Ring Three? Maybe -- I honestly don't know if any threads are left open for an additional film. I know this, though -- one of the trailers that ran before this movie was for
The Skeleton Key, a horror film based on the novel by the guy who also wrote
Ringu. The screenwriter? Ehren Kruger.
Be afraid.
Rating: *1/2
