Back Shelf Beauties
by Willie Waffle

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 Manhattan bar and luring in some drunk lady who will go for his looks?  Using these scenes would have helped make the case for how weird this dude is and help build up to the big kidnapping by increasing the drama and luring in the audience.  Instead, we jump right to it with some mildly surprising shocks, and some predictable twists and turns.     

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. 

½ Waffle (Out of 4)

P2 is rated R for strong violence/gore, terror and language

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