Don't Breathe 2 (2021)

 Score: 1 / 5

It's a sequel, which we wanted, but not the sequel we wanted or deserved. The first Don't Breathe was a taut home invasion thriller that eventually spilled over the razor's edge into screaming horror, an astoundingly daring venture into the darkest recesses of suburban decay and domestic trauma. Stephen Lang gave us one of the scariest villains of the decade -- certainly of the genre -- and Fede Alvarez's direction deftly braided tropes and references to similar films into a strong cable of novelty. And Pedro Luque's (Antebellum, The Girl in the Spider's Web) utterly gorgeous cinematography should have made him the hottest new talent of the last few years. The movie made you care about all the characters, made you feel like one of them; it exploited our collective hunger for violence before turning the tables and making us wish for more. And it had a lot of fun doing it.

By the end, it left us wondering what might happen to Rocky and her younger sister, as they finally leave Detroit for sunny Los Angeles by train. From the news report, we knew Norman Nordstrom (Lang) had survived and was recovering in hospital, but there was no mention of what he had done in his basement. Might he lean into his apparent disability to heal and then seek revenge under the radar? Might he even journey beyond his own home to hunt down the girl who escaped his grasp? It's a tantalizing setup, one that might put the fascinating, demented character at an unusual disadvantage. 

But, right from the start, Don't Breathe 2 chooses all the wrong things. With no Jane Levy or Dylan Minnette to anchor the film, or anyone else of comparable star value, we are meant to focus solely on Nordstrom himself. While Lang muscles his way through the starring role with his usual panache, he is given very little to do dramatically, even less than in the first movie. In fact, if anything, he's made pretty pathetic by the writers, who desperately try to ignore the horrors he inflicted previously and make him a sympathetic hero. Now he finally has a daughter (Madelyn Grace) who he's training to be a survivalist like himself, and he seems to be remarkably well-adjusted. When gangsters invade his house once more and abduct the girl, Nordstrom is forced to go out into the wide world to get her back and butcher everyone along the way. It's like Taken and Don't Breathe had a really ugly baby.

Never as clever, terrifying, or horrific as the first, this sequel tries to be ballsier and just ends up weirder. I'm going to spoil it for you, so if you're excited to see this flick, stop reading now. Although, really, it's not worth it.

Even with a child abduction, Nordstrom can never claim our sympathies because of what he did in the previous film. As we learn his history with his daughter, things get weird. He found her apparently orphaned and alone in the middle of the street after a house fire; taking her home, he names her Phoenix. In case that doesn't hit you over the head enough, know that his bloodthirsty dog that follows her around is named Shadow. We eventually learn that her parents are in fact still alive and part of a burgeoning organ trafficking ring; they are behind her kidnapping and want to use her heart to save her mother. The forced idea of her biological parents being worse than her serial rapist and murderer of a foster father is hard enough to swallow, even as this movie hammers home his love for dogs.

It's just not redemptive enough for this viewer, and in fact I kept waiting for Nordstrom to show his true colors. He doesn't, and in the climax he even delivers a self-flagellating few lines as if to atone for what he did. It's laughably stupid, and I almost walked out of the theater. Making a monster likable isn't necessarily hard, but trying to redeem someone this evil and remorseless is the most unforgivable thing these artists could have done in a sequel. Hear none, see none, and speak none, and let's hope Don't Breathe 2 suffocates itself right out of our memory.