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Shelf Beauties |
P2 I know we have talked about
this before, but you know your movie has reached all time lows when the
people
in the theater are openly mocking it.
I’m not talking about the jaded critics
who have to see stuff like this
on a regular basis. I’m
talking about regular
people with tickets who don’t want to feel like they wasted
an entire evening
with a dreadful film. When
they turn on
a movie, like they did when I saw P2,
it’s not just bad. It’s
sucktacular. Rachel Nichols stars as
Angela – a professional stuck working late on Christmas Eve
(and let me point
out this is NOT the delectable, every-man’s-fantasy Rachel
Nichols the sports
reporter from ESPN (she’s beautiful AND likes sports!),
it’s the Rachel Nichols
you have never heard of, and won’t see in this movie). When her car
won’t start, Angela looks to the
parking garage’s security guard, Thomas (Wes Bentley), for
help, but, as you
probably know by now, Thomas is not interested in helping Angela. Instead, he captures her
and forces the young
lady to attend his special Christmas dinner for two (I fear where he
might hang
the mistletoe). Will Angela be able to
escape from this madman? Will
anyone come to her aid? P2
suffers most from the
horrible casting of Wes Bentley in the crazy man role.
With borderline matinee idol looks and eyes
most women would find more dreamy than nightmarish, Bentley
doesn’t have what
it takes to be creepy and scary. He’s
too pretty. I have
a feeling most women
in the audience would be quite happy if he tied them up and made an
intimate
dinner for two. Maybe
he should get a
gig as one of the new doctors on Grey’s
Anatomy, while someone like Steve
Buscemi or James Gandolfini could strike fear in the hearts of women
everywhere. Would
you want Buscemi to
tie you up? I
didn’t think so. Instead, Bentley elicits
more laughter than you will find in Fred Claus
as he overacts his way through
almost every scene of P2.
It’s an
unintentionally campy maniacal turn instead of Hannibal Lecter imposing
and
getting under your skin scary, which is what P2 needs to be better. However, you can’t say
it’s
all Bentley’s fault. He
would have been
helped by writers Alexandre Aja and Greg Levasseur as well as director
Franck
Khalfoun if they spent more time developing Thomas’s
background and showing us
how ghoulish this dude is underneath the attempts to be sweet and kind. How long has he been
obsessed with this
lady? How much time
does he spend spying
on her? How did he
come up with this
plan? Why does he
need to chloroform a
woman into spending the evening with him instead of heading out to the
nearest Khalfoun gives us some
interesting scenes of Thomas scaring Angela out of hiding places, and I
have to
compliment him on the nice use of a dangerous, vicious dog to make the
situation more dire, but the script is weak and the movie kind of half
heartedly attempting to be good. P2 is rated R for strong violence/gore, terror and language.
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