Seriously, what the fuck? Why is there an Unfriended 2? I can’t believe that I’m even saying “Unfriended 2.” I didn’t even know that this was in production and just heard of it a few weeks ago when I saw the trailer. That was probably the most frightening trailer that I’ve ever seen, as the dread built inside of me as I realized what it was. I see a lot of shitty movies, but the first Unfriended was particularly difficult to sit through. But, I thought, this movie didn’t seem to follow the story of the original. I didn’t see any of the same characters. So maybe, just maybe, it might be better. Maybe it might even be okay. Sure. And in the words of the great Ash J. Williams, maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot.
Sure enough, this film doesn’t follow the plot of the original. The original was about the ghost of a girl that committed suicide after being bullied haunting people on social media (yes that’s the same plot as Friend Request, in case you’re one of the 14 other people that saw that piece of shit). This one is about an idiot named Matias that steals a computer and discovers that the previous owner’s profession is kidnapping girls and selling videos of their murders on the dark web. For the unaware, the dark web is basically the parts of the web that can’t be accessed through a search engine (you have to know the direct url to get there, in other words). As you might imagine, the dark web is mainly a haven for shitty people to do shitty things. You go there to launder money or to buy drugs or women or the rare NC-17 rated version of Moana or whatever floats your douchey boat. Anyway, Matias and his friends have a game night via Skype (because apparently people can’t even be in the same room for a fucking game night anymore) and the dark web folks stalk them because they want their snuff-film filled hard drive back.
This is a sequel in the sense that it uses the gimmick of the original, which is that the entire film is shown via the characters’ computer screens and primarily through Skype conversations. If you winced at how stupid that sounds, then congratulations: you aren’t part of the problem. I simply can’t get past how bad these movies look. Ever been on a video conference call at work and thought “shit, this is how to tell a compelling story!” Fuck no, you haven’t. It’s goddamn painful to sit there and watch people talk to each other this way. It also eliminates minor filmmaking elements like staging, lighting, shot composition, etc. Fuck all that shit, we just need fixed views from a computer screen. If these movies are meant as subtle allegories about technology destroying the craft of filmmaking, then they are brilliant. But they aren’t, so they can fuck off.
Everything in this movie is fucking asinine. I’m not exactly a hacker, but I have serious doubts about the feasibility of the shit done in this film. The villains easily hack into a subway station (the whole station, apparently) to delay a train and into a life-support machine to kill someone in a hospital. Do life-support machines even have an internet connection? If so, why? Not even Angelina Jolie could hack into shit this well. Everything also depends on either absurd levels of luck or stupidity. The main character convinces the others that it’s all a game at one point (I won’t get into why, but rest assured that its stupid) and they accept that. They don’t question the astronomical number of variables that would be involved if this was a game. But it turns out that they shouldn’t because it’s revealed in the end that this was actually all a game for the villains as they placed bets on who would survive and what each character would do (kind of like Cabin in the Woods, except fucking stupid). I can’t even fathom the size of the statistical model that it would take to turn such a complicated sequence of events into a game. As Dr. Ian Malcom concluded in his treatise on chaos theory: Life, uh, finds a way. Unless you’re in this movie. Then controlling the actions of multiple people through multiple complicated scenarios has better odds than a goddamn coin flip.
As for the horror, there isn’t much to speak of. This movie is R-rated, but I don’t know why. Maybe somebody said “fuck” more than once. Almost all of the violence is off-screen and, in the few times that something does happen in view of a computer screen, the steady internet connection breaks up conveniently at the perfect time to deprive the audience of actually seeing something happen. The concept of the snuff-film trade on the dark web could be disturbing as hell in a better film, but this lacks both the balls and talent to do anything with the idea. There weren’t even any jump scares, really. I saw this with a surprisingly large audience considering that the movie bombed at the box office, and the theater was a quiet as a library for the duration. The audience’s indifference was reassuring, though, as an enthusiastic response to this piece of shit would have just made me more sad.
If you want to watch a disturbing movie about snuff films, then watch 8mm with Nicolas Cage. But not this. Never this. Now, I have to prepare for The Gallows 2 or The Darkness 2 or whatever fucking ridiculous horror sequel will be thrown at me next. And by “prepare,” I mean drink heavily.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfriended:_Dark_Web#/media/File:UnfriendedDarkWebPoster.jpg
