The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B+
First, I have to give Paramount credit for the title of this movie. Nowadays, I expected this to be called A More Quiet Place or A Quiet Place: Requiem for Sound or Silence: From the Book of A Quiet Place or some ridiculous nonsense. But, no, they went with the simple and classic A Quiet Place Part II and I really appreciate it. When there are seven of these movies a decade from now, I won’t have to try to remember which one this is in the sequence. It’s the little things that get me through the day.
Anyway, I liked the original A Quiet Place, but I wasn’t as crazy about it as most people seemed to be. I’m happy to report that I actually like this sequel a bit better than the original. While I largely have the same issues as I did with the original (specifically the lame monsters and watered-down horror elements), A Quiet Place Part II is a solid sequel and expansion of the original story that is considerably bolstered by excellent performances.
The film begins as a prequel showing the initial arrival of the aliens on earth before the events of the first film. While I was initially skeptical that this opening sequence was a throwaway prologue that purely exists to get John Krasinski into the trailers, it’s actually an effective sequence that lays groundwork for the larger story (even though it’s a shame that the trailers did ruin some of the better scenes here). Flash forward to immediately after the events of the first film and our surviving heroes (led by Emily Blunt) are now armed with the knowledge of the creatures’ weakness and seek to spread the word. In their travels, they encounter an old friend (played by Cillian Murphy) and set their sights on a still-broadcasting radio station as a way of informing others about the way to kill the aliens.
I give a lot of credit to director/co-writer Krasinski for the restraint shown in developing this sequel. Following the massive success of the original, a lesser filmmaker likely would have drastically expanded the scope and had the heroes attack an alien ship or something. Instead of going the overblown route, the new chapter presents a logical and fairly low-key expansion of this world. While I have heard some categorize this as a lack of ambition, I appreciate that the film expands beyond the farm of the original while still retaining the tone and somewhat claustrophobic feeling of the original. This feels like a logical continuation rather than a grandiose Hollywood escalation. It does, however, feel like the connecting tissue chapter of a trilogy, used to get our characters from point A to point B to set up a larger finale. That’s not necessarily a bad thing (in the grand scheme of things, one could argue that The Empire Strikes Back, The Dark Knight and The Two Towers also fit this description), but viewers expecting any sense of closure will be disappointed.
Like the first film, the material is greatly elevated by the performances. This is a creature feature, after all, and not a particularly original one; take the basic setup and tone of Signs, mix in a little dash of Tremors and you basically get A Quiet Place. But the A-list cast takes this as seriously as they would some Oscar-nominated piece of shit. The amazing Emily Blunt (who I didn’t find attractive until I saw her as Mary Poppins, which I’ll add to my list of shit to discuss with a therapist someday) conveys both strength and trauma with minimal dialogue in a performance that should be studied in a film school master class in expression through facial expressions and body language. Cillian Murphy’s performance is so interesting that I would welcome a spin-off film about this character. Murphy has an unnerving way of being both weak and vaguely threatening at the same time, a combination that pays off beautifully here with an unexpectedly satisfying arc. The children (often the weak point in a cast like this) are also excellently performed by Noah Jupe and Millicent Simmonds. Simmonds, who is deaf in real life, particularly deserves accolades. While I fear that deafness may limit her options in her film career, she has quickly grown into one of our most promising young actresses and I hope that she can continue to defy the odds.
The great flaw, as with the first film, is that the horror elements are pretty weak. I said (more or less) that the original is a great family drama built around horror elements and the family elements greatly overshadow the horror. Same deal here. While there are a couple of good setpieces (trying not to scream when your foot is caught in a bear trap must be a bitch), this just isn’t very scary. The monsters are still incredibly lame, lazily-designed, computer-generated borefests. I can’t help but wonder how much more effective these movies would be if they had the creature design and effects of something like Alien or The Thing. Alas, we are again stuck with uninspired monsters that look like they were created by an undergraduate graphic design class. The fact that the monsters don’t do very much doesn’t help either. Limited by the PG-13 rating, this was never going to be a gorefest, nor does it need to be. But there is little menace when the monsters are limited to (as my friend put it) awkwardly punching people in the side of the head. Unlike the monsters themselves, the horror here is completely toothless and this removes any genuine fright from otherwise suspenseful setups.
I consider this to be a small improvement on the original (I wrote that review years before starting this website, but would have given it a B or B- in my current format), but it still suffers from the same issues. It’s a solid film, but doesn’t work particularly well as a horror film. If you enjoyed the first one, then you should find a lot to like here. If you didn’t enjoy the first one, expect more of the same.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Quiet_Place_Part_II#/media/File:A_Quiet_Place_Part_II.jpg
