Sometimes a film offers up an emblematic moment, one that crystallizes what is at the heart of the action and in RING TWO, that moment can be summed up in two words. Angry deer. They appear after Rachel (Naomi Watts returning after what may be the result of a lost bar bet) and her continually spooky son, Aiden (David Dorfman), realize that the nasty little girl ghost from RING I is still after them. Well, shed have to be, or else why would there be a RING TWO?
Actually, thats a question that comes to mind anyway. Bringing Hideo Nakata, the director of RINGU, the vastly superior Japanese original on which Gore Verbinski’s RING I was based, to helm here seems to be all that the producers of this lead balloon thought necessary to re-capture the magic, tarnished though it was, of RING I. They were wrong. Perhaps if they had let Hiroshi Takahashi, who wrote the original script write this one. But no, that honor went to Ehren Kruger, whose plan was to re-hash his script of RING I and hope that nobody would notice.
As a thoughtful recap, or a rip-off of the originals opening, we have two generic teenagers and the fateful video that will cause anyone who watches it to drop dead seven days later. Cut to Rachel in her new home somewhere far from Seattle but still easy driving distance from where things went so very bad for her and Aiden in RING I. Its small town and Rachel has found work on the local paper, where the most excitement theyve had in years comes over the police scanner just as Rachel is heading home. Its a murder, ah, but not just any kind of murder. No, the angry little girl ghost has found Rachels zip code and is, Rachel is convinced, going to zero in on her and her son.
Theres no point in further discussing the plot. There is no internal logic at work here. Rachel messes with corpses at crime scenes and none of the phalanx of police officers notices. She messes with the crime scene itself with the same lack of results. After a particularly unpleasant supernatural manifestation in her new home, she flees to her place of work in the middle of the night, a fact that makes finding all her co-workers there seem odd only to the audience. That Rachel returns to the house to get a few things before taking Aiden and running for their lives is an insult the intelligence of everyone involved.
And then there are those angry deer. Even though Aiden is yelling at her to not stop the SUV, that is, of course, exactly what she does. Not just, I think, because Rachel is the sort of idiot character than films like this demand, but also on some level even an idiot can see something that incongruous and be stunned into inaction. Were there no wolves in the forest that the nasty little girl ghost can work with? No bears? A gaggle of testy raccoons? You can almost see Rachel thinking with disbelief that she and her spooky spawn are about to be done in by hoofed ungulates.
Fighting evil incarnate and a plot that is turgid and murky, Rachel muddles along for no readily apparent reason wreaking havoc on those who come anywhere near her, while Aiden begins to channel Eddie Haskell, an effect that is not as edgy as it might sound here. Nakata, who can when given the chance, create a mood of atmospheric tension and terror the equal of anything that jumps up and goes boo here creates a series of massive yawns. As does Sissy Spacek as the requisite crazy woman with all the answers about how to deal with a naughty specter.
RING TWO is a misguided attempt to cash in on the cachet of the originals, Japanese- and English-language. As such, its only accomplishment is proving, once again, Hollywoods propensity for catering to the triumph of greed over reason.
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