About a month ago, I was at the movies (as I tend to be) and I saw the trailer for The Boy 2. At the end of the trailer, a guy behind me asked “when the fuck was there a Boy 1?” That guy’s question is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, although I saw the original The Boy, I was surprised that the sequel received a nationwide theatrical release. The first movie wasn’t awful and it did mediocre business at the box office, but I expected a sequel would be released straight to video/streaming. Second, The Boy 2 seemingly assumes that nobody in the audience has seen the original movie. This film is somewhat remarkable in that it completely contradicts the events of the original, amounting to a feature length middle finger to people that bothered to see the first movie. If you have seen The Boy, then this movie is confusing and boring as hell. If you haven’t seen the original, then it’s just boring.
Going into the original The Boy, I assumed that it was going to be an Annabelle knockoff about a haunted doll. But it wasn’t. Spoilers for a movie from 2016: The twist in the original is that the doll isn’t haunted, there is a psycho living in the walls of the house that is moving the doll around to make it seem haunted. That plot twist at least made the movie a bit interesting, albeit ridiculous. It is important to note that the movie made it clear that there was, in fact, nothing supernatural about the doll.
That last point is important for explaining why this movie is such a pile of horseshit. One of the first rules of writing a sequel is that you can’t pretend that the mystery of the first movie is still a mystery. The audience is in on it at this point, the cat is out of the bag. In the original Child’s Play, for instance, there is a lot of buildup to seeing Chucky come fully to life. In Child’s Play 2, you see Chucky right from the beginning because there is no point to building up to it again. This movie again presents the same mystery as another family encounters the supposedly haunted doll, apparently banking on my getting a concussion and forgetting the end of the first movie. I sat there in a state of soul-murdering boredom as I waited and waited for these characters to arrive at a conclusion that I already knew.
Or so I thought, because then the movie doubles down on telling me to go fuck myself. The ending (yeah I’m spoiling it, nobody cares) reveals that the doll is haunted and has been evil for a very long time. No, I’m sorry, you can’t do that shit. You can’t completely retcon the first movie and pretend that the whole guy-in-the-walls thing either didn’t happen or was just an incredible coincidence. Sure, some long-running horror series, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Halloween, have had retcons, but that’s after seven or eight movies. You can’t have Part 2 make absolutely no fucking sense in the context of Part 1. I thought maybe the filmmakers hadn’t even seen the first one, but, no, it’s the same director and writer as the original! How the fuck does that happen? They even reveal that the doll has a demonic face underneath his doll face. Motherfuckers, we have already seen his face cracked open multiple times and that shit was hollow. Just because I’m in a theater by myself watching The Boy 2, that doesn’t mean that I’m fucking dumb enough to forget shit that you just showed me an hour earlier. Outside of the Fast & Furious series, I have never encountered a movie that shows such presumptive disdain for the intelligence level of its audience.
This movie oddly makes more sense if you haven’t seen the original, but it’s still awful. A few years ago, I saw a movie called The Darkness, which was a lame Poltergeist ripoff starring Kevin Bacon. The Darkness is notable only because it was the only horror movie that I had ever seen in which nobody dies. Well, Darkness, The Boy 2 now joins your ranks. Nobody dies in this and only a couple of people even get hurt. The scares are all of the jump-scare variety and are the most unimaginative of the sort. Yeah, the doll’s head is tilted differently when someone looks in a mirror. Never seen that before. A small figure runs across screen while one note of loud music plays, a shot that is seemingly a contractual requirement for all modern horror movies. Most of the movie is just Katie Holmes walking around a big house and looking confused, perhaps reflecting upon her career. This shouldn’t even be PG-13, this is really a PG movie. Just a week ago I thought that Fantasy Island had set a new standard for how watered-down horror films have become, but this makes Fantasy Island look like Friday the 13th.
The Boy 2 is the shitty movie that I expected when I went to see the original, so props for finally delivering on my expectations. At only 86 minutes long, this still felt like an agonizing test of patience. As somebody that has seen the original, this will be memorable only as an insane example of a misguided sequel. For anyone that hasn’t seen the original, you will forget that this movie exists by the time the end credits are half finished. Nobody wins, really.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahms:_The_Boy_II#/media/File:Brahms_The_Boy_Poster.jpg
